From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Jun 1 00:01:51 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 31 May 2008 17:01:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Total State References: Message-ID: <108201c8c37a$feea3f10$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> IN the earlier flds thread, John Clark wrote > Amara writes > >> I found the State of Texas' actions to be a mind-numbing >> expression of among the worst of the U.S.' aggressive >> against-its-citizens, police-state, government-imposed >> purity criteria actions > > A bit of verbal inflation here. If the USA is a police state then > you'll have to invent a new word to describe North Korea, and > all that can get tedious. And you're being unfair to police states. > Totalitarian regimes have worked long and hard developing evil > into a high art and there you go cheapening their image by > comparing them to the wimpy actions of the USA. Masterfully said. >> and it added to my long list of reasons why I shouldn't be >> living in the U.S. Well, every country has its problems (for any given one of us). Even the enlightened countries of Europe, e.g., Italy, pose their own obnoxious and disagreeable problems for some people. Alas, on the globe the realist sees only real countries, no ideal ones. Amara goes on to write in this thread r'chere > > A bit of verbal inflation here. If the USA is a police state > > Brief references: > > 1) > The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek > (a primer on the making of The Total State. The US is right on track.) That sounds *exactly* correct to me. It's very sad, but very true. I wonder what countries, however, are not headed down this path? > 2) > http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/chinas_allseeing_eye/1 > China's All-Seeing Eye by Naomi Klein > With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the > prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export. Thanks for that too. Yup, things are bad all over, no lie. (Though we must be careful to be objective about this and realize just how wonderful it is to be living in almost *any* industrialized modern nation, compared to living in 1950 anywhere at all.) > 3) > "The Best Prisons that Money Can Buy" > http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/02/index.html The U.S. is such an incredible outlier on that graph! But there is a simple explanation. Now, since we are talking about the prospect of becoming a police state, let me indulge in (and exult in) a little bit of hate speech and thought crime (while I still can get away with it). I hope that no one on this list gets too upset. Consider that in California prisons, the highest representative ethnic group is Hispanic. And blacks are nearly a third also. In order of size, are Hispanics, whites, and blacks. (Where is the Asian contingent, one wonders. Maybe they're in charge, and everyone else is being discriminated against?) Also, as everyone knows, half of those incarcerated in American prisons are there for drug possession. So, if you subtract half the inmate population who're there on drug charges, and then subtract the minorities, the U.S. stats resemble the stats for the enlightened northern European countries exceedingly well. Which is true simply because that's where they came from. Lee From aiguy at comcast.net Sun Jun 1 00:34:17 2008 From: aiguy at comcast.net (Gary Miller) Date: Sat, 31 May 2008 20:34:17 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [agi] Memory as a movie ;crosspost to ExI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Bob Mottram posted on agi2 >> An interesting case of a woman who never forgets. She describes her memories as a continuously running movie, which she can't turn off. http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2008/05/20080520_b_main.asp Perhaps we all have this kind of memory, but most of the time we only have limited or no conscious access to it. >> Has any one read her book yet The Woman Who Can't Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science--A Memoir (Hardcover) by Jill Price (Author), Bart Davis (Contributor) I just ordered it from Amazon. I am hoping that they have done some extensive measurements on her brains electrical activity as compared to normal humans. There have been some articles posted recently about deep brain stimulation on the hypothalamus improving memory. http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2008-02/2008-02-01-voa33.cfm I wonder if there is a way to use Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)to increase activity in the hypothalamus. I can see that it's location looks to be about as far as you can get from the surface of the head. But a picture in Wikipedia make it look like it's just behind an open area which I can only surmise is the back of the sinus cavity. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9f/LocationOfHypothala mus.jpg/250px-LocationOfHypothalamus.jpg I wonder if TMS has ever been attempted through the Sinus cavity in an attempt to stimulate the hypthalamus. While this would not be completely noninvasive it sounds a lot safer and less expensive, if doable than implanting electrodes for direct brain stimulation. I also wonder what lever of detail these memories contain. Can she go back and read a book from her memories after she first read it? And how easily can she concentrate on given task if she's reading is her mind constantly flooded with memories of things she has read before or can she suspend associating current content with past memories until a later time. I am also interested on any drawbacks she feels this gift may have come with and why she hasn't cleaned up on Jeopardy already. DISCLAIMER: I am not a doctor, so before anyone goes stuffing electromagnets up your nose, see you physician! From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Jun 1 06:13:44 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sat, 31 May 2008 23:13:44 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Total State References: <108201c8c37a$feea3f10$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <918a899d0805311752r588155d9r5dcfecf141471766@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <108e01c8c3ae$d5fb9660$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Joseph writes > [Lee wrote] > > [Amara wrote] > > > 3) > > > "The Best Prisons that Money Can Buy" > > > http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/02/index.html > > > > let me indulge in (and exult in) a little bit of hate speech > > and thought crime (while I can still get away with it)... > > > > Consider that in California prisons... In order of [population], > > are Hispanics, whites, and blacks. > > One wonders what the standard of living in those > California prisons is, The question is wrong---unless it's kept in mind what ethnic group in a certain prison is ascendant. Even more important is where an individual lies in the pecking order. Unlike "outside"---where the law is to protect the weak from the depredations of the strong (except in Texas)--- "inside" there is no law, except the law of the jungle. The result is that there, the very worst creatures are in the most powerful positions, while, God help us, anyone remotely like those of us here participating in this forum would be a forlorn and helpless victim, utterly at the mercy of the big tough bastards and gang leaders And Keith did write that while one may find fellow prisoners with some humanity, not so the guards. (I'm probably exaggerating just a bit, or he was.) > compared to, say, southern California's large cities. > Or Mexico's small villages. Do the prisoners get more > calories per day? I'd be guessing, but probably more calories than in *some* small Mexican villages. Actually, the prisoners probably receive *fewer* calories than all the tubbies on the outside, because of their ample time to exercise, all the free equipment provided for that purpose, and the well-balanced nutritious meals prepared for them. But don't forget the free health care! > Do they suffer from disease at a lesser rate? Is there > a difference in literacy rates (with the educational > opportunities in prison)? I don't know. There is probably some obvious way that certain diseases correlate with being in prison, but I can't think of what right now. Lee > I'm by no means suggesting that being a felon in the > U.S. is preferable to freedom as a Mexican peasant. > But perhaps there are some mitigating factors that > need to be considered here when looking at raw > incarceration statistics... From stathisp at gmail.com Sun Jun 1 06:57:21 2008 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2008 16:57:21 +1000 Subject: [ExI] The Total State In-Reply-To: <108201c8c37a$feea3f10$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <108201c8c37a$feea3f10$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: 2008/6/1 Lee Corbin : >> "The Best Prisons that Money Can Buy" >> http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/02/index.html > > The U.S. is such an incredible outlier on that graph! > > But there is a simple explanation. Now, since we are > talking about the prospect of becoming a police state, > let me indulge in (and exult in) a little bit of hate speech > and thought crime (while I still can get away with it). > I hope that no one on this list gets too upset. > > Consider that in California prisons, the highest representative > ethnic group is Hispanic. And blacks are nearly a third also. > In order of size, are Hispanics, whites, and blacks. > (Where is the Asian contingent, one wonders. Maybe > they're in charge, and everyone else is being discriminated > against?) > > Also, as everyone knows, half of those incarcerated in > American prisons are there for drug possession. > > So, if you subtract half the inmate population who're > there on drug charges, and then subtract the minorities, > the U.S. stats resemble the stats for the enlightened > northern European countries exceedingly well. Which > is true simply because that's where they came from. But note the considerably lower incarceration rates in most of Latin America and Africa compared to the US. Does this mean the US turns people into criminals or selectively attracts people with criminal tendencies? -- Stathis Papaioannou From aiguy at comcast.net Sun Jun 1 14:02:21 2008 From: aiguy at comcast.net (Gary Miller) Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2008 10:02:21 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Total State In-Reply-To: References: <108201c8c37a$feea3f10$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <15A658C5E0B947699721C7E61566609C@ZANDRA2> Stathis Papaioannou asked: << But note the considerably lower incarceration rates in most of Latin America and Africa compared to the US. Does this mean the US turns people into criminals or selectively attracts people with criminal tendencies? >> The obvious answer based upon media events and my talking to coworkers who come from Latin America and third world countries is: Unless you are rich, powerful, or know exactly who the perpetrator is it is difficult to get any kind of investigation much less justice in these countries. No investigation means no arrest, no conviction no incarceration, not even a crime occurrence recorded for statistic sake. Also many criminals can make more money by joining the local police force, or local warlord's militia accepting bribes, extorting money from people running illegal businesses, and selling illegal drugs, money and merchandise confiscated as part of their official duties. Of course if they keep the evidence and sell it they can't arrest the prisoner and have them convicted for lack of evidence. No arrest no incarceration. Of course they could kill the suspect but then wouldn't be able to repeat the confiscation of contraband next time. And in that case they still don't show up as an incarceration. Also honest cops do not have a very long life expectency in these countries. In Mexico right being an honest law enforcement officer is like having a bullseye on your back. Even the crooked cops are targets because if they work for one cartel they're on the other cartel's hit list. http://www.nationalpost.com/related/links/story.html?id=501840 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7393443.stm http://uk.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUKN0820504520080508 http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSN2739778420080527 http://news.aol.com/story/_a/no-2-police-officer-in-mexican-border/n20080510 213209990005 So no maybe the answer to your question is that the US has a much higher rate of effective law enforcement and a resonable if not perfect justice system. And although every force has a few bad apples on it, we have checks and balances with internal affairs and at the federal level to prevent whole precincts from going rogue. From jonkc at bellsouth.net Sun Jun 1 14:47:29 2008 From: jonkc at bellsouth.net (John K Clark) Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2008 10:47:29 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings References: <20070210113413.GQ21677@leitl.org><000601c74d36$14b5a5d0$80bd1f97@archimede><20070210182045.GF21677@leitl.org><3cf171fe0702101031y61274711hde9a72a2eb2e31ba@mail.gmail.com><20070210184954.GI21677@leitl.org><3cf171fe0702101223t1a3884bdqf57c6677ae95ee1e@mail.gmail.com><005101c74da7$2168ec30$0a054e0c@MyComputer><7.0.1.0.2.20070211111725.0220a620@satx.rr.com><006801c74e0c$b600d370$59044e0c@MyComputer> <7.0.1.0.2.20070211130148.02318940@satx.rr.com><002e01c74ec3$ee5eadc0$0f0b4e0c@MyComputer><45D09A16.4020908@goertzel.org><005a01c74ef1$0bc8eab0$3c064e0c@MyComputer> <000301c8c34d$4877fba0$a9e61e97@archimede> Message-ID: <010b01c8c3f6$735e7340$0301a8c0@MyComputer> "scerir" > CF [cold fusion], closer Closer than what, the Virgo Supercluster of galaxies? >but still not ... readable on Nature True, it's not published in any respectable science journal, but the bozo did invite newspaper reporters to publish it and 2 local TV stations. And everybody knows if it's on TV it must be true. The article (http://www.physorg.com/news131101595.html) mentions "esteemed Physics Professor Yoshiaki Arata of Osaka University in Japan". I've never heard of him and know nothing about him except that he knows how to type. On January 29 2007 I wrote: "The pattern is always the same, every few months somebody few have heard of claims to have detected excess heat, a few people even more obscure repeat the experiment and say they see it too; but when people you actually have head of try it they see nothing." And now it is time for Joe Blow the truck driver to repeat the results with remarkable ease and report the results in Spoon Bending Digest while the boiling water IQ people at CERN fail to find a damn thing. Crap like this and Bigfoot and flying saucers and ESP never dies, it doesn't even fade away, just gets more and more ridiculous. John K Clark From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Jun 1 15:13:48 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2008 08:13:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Total State References: <108201c8c37a$feea3f10$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <10a601c8c3fa$6fd59dd0$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stathis writes > [Lee wrote] > >> So, if you subtract half the inmate population who're >> there on drug charges, and then subtract the minorities, >> the U.S. stats resemble the stats for the enlightened >> northern European countries exceedingly well. Which >> is true simply because that's where they came from. > > But note the considerably lower incarceration rates in > most of Latin America and Africa compared to the US. A strikingly acute observation (bringing those facts into conflation with my statement above). But then, perhaps you have missed an even more striking consequence of your observation. Namely, let us once again forget the half of the inmates who're there on drug charges, and imagine that the new position the U.S. would occupy on the amazing graphic that Amara supplied: http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/images/prisonindex.pdf This brings the U.S. down to "merely" the level of Barbados, Ukraine, and Singapore, in other words, still vastly above the other industrialized nations. Then consider the new probability that this implies for the incarceration of, say, someone who'd been born in Mexico, Nicaragua, or Columbia. Since these Hispanics already constitute a fraction of the inmate all out of proportion to their population in the U.S., this implies unequivocally that the probability of that person being placed in prison is vastly greater than had he remained in his native country. > Does this mean the US turns people into criminals or selectively > attracts people with criminal tendencies? I would say *both* are necessarily true, and thanks for pointing out these consequences too. But I should explain what I think that the causal mechanisms are at another time, because I just see that Gary Miller has written authoritatively on the subject, and for the sake of list quality must refer my fans to his great post :-) (I promise them two outrageous and provocative---though still very logical---hypotheses later.) Lee From jonkc at bellsouth.net Sun Jun 1 17:25:31 2008 From: jonkc at bellsouth.net (John K Clark) Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2008 13:25:31 -0400 Subject: [ExI] GLAST References: <108201c8c37a$feea3f10$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <001701c8c40c$8a147fb0$0301a8c0@MyComputer> On Thursday the GLAST Gamma Ray observatory will be launched. I'll wager that during its first 10 days of operation it will produce more and better science than the vastly more expensive International Space Station will over its entire life. John K Clark From moulton at moulton.com Sun Jun 1 20:06:58 2008 From: moulton at moulton.com (Fred C. Moulton) Date: Sun, 01 Jun 2008 13:06:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Total State In-Reply-To: References: <108201c8c37a$feea3f10$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <1212350818.16588.1919.camel@hayek> Can I strongly suggest that everyone slow down for a moment and make sure that they are not coming conclusions that are not supported. Consider that if a persons in a lower socio-economic level are incarcerated at a higher rate than those at a different socio-economic level and if a demographic subgroup is disproportionally represented in the lower socio-economic level then members of the subgroup will likely be incarcerated at a higher rate. Thus merely looking any single factor alone might lead to unsubstantiated conclusions. Thus the key indicator may not be a particular demographic such as race or immigration status; it might be something else. Since incarceration rates are shifted by many factors including competency of defense council, honesty of prosecutors, access to non-incarceration alternatives, etc I feel that we need to be cautious and careful in coming to conclusions. As I have said in the past I have high expectations for the posts to this list and I strongly suggest we all try to maintain high standards in our analysis. One thing I try to do is to see if I have incorporated some idea such as racial and ethnic differences uncritically into my analysis when other factors may provide a better understanding of the issue under consideration. It is not always easy but it is often fruitful. Fred From spike66 at att.net Sun Jun 1 21:37:55 2008 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2008 14:37:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Total State In-Reply-To: <1212350818.16588.1919.camel@hayek> Message-ID: <200806012204.m51M4drV002349@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > Fred C. Moulton > Subject: Re: [ExI] The Total State > >...Since incarceration rates are shifted by > many factors including competency of defense council, honesty > of prosecutors, access to non-incarceration alternatives, etc...Fred I thought of a factor I hadn't seen mentioned: advanced crime fighting technology. I have a friend who works for the telephone company recovering stolen cel phones. He made a comment that has rattled around in my brain for years. As a group, the recovery team gets smarter and smarter, but as a group the criminals don't. The phone guys have techniques that allow the recovery team to figure out where the criminal has called, which often leads to discovery of other crimes the sleazebag has perped since the phone was stolen, such as identity theft. (The cops love this cel phone recovery team.) Often entire crime rings can be exposed in this way. Many criminal careers are ended early and safely. Well, not safely for the criminals, but for society. As technology advances, I can see further advances in crime prevention, as well as technologies that will take the guesswork out of court trials. This is important for America especially, for I have long suspected that many countries buy their criminals one-way tickets to these shores, this expediency being much cheaper than prisons. We already know Cuba did this in the 1980s. spike From msd001 at gmail.com Mon Jun 2 02:14:59 2008 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2008 22:14:59 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings In-Reply-To: <010b01c8c3f6$735e7340$0301a8c0@MyComputer> References: <20070210113413.GQ21677@leitl.org> <005101c74da7$2168ec30$0a054e0c@MyComputer> <7.0.1.0.2.20070211111725.0220a620@satx.rr.com> <006801c74e0c$b600d370$59044e0c@MyComputer> <7.0.1.0.2.20070211130148.02318940@satx.rr.com> <002e01c74ec3$ee5eadc0$0f0b4e0c@MyComputer> <45D09A16.4020908@goertzel.org> <005a01c74ef1$0bc8eab0$3c064e0c@MyComputer> <000301c8c34d$4877fba0$a9e61e97@archimede> <010b01c8c3f6$735e7340$0301a8c0@MyComputer> Message-ID: <62c14240806011914u18e06d26x982eb0108e0cb289@mail.gmail.com> On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 10:47 AM, John K Clark wrote: > And now it is time for Joe Blow the truck driver to repeat the > results with remarkable ease and report the results in Spoon > Bending Digest while the boiling water IQ people at CERN fail > to find a damn thing. You meant boiling water IQ as in Fahrenheit? Because boiling water IQ in Celsius is average by definition. "declare your units" :) From nanogirl at halcyon.com Mon Jun 2 05:02:46 2008 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2008 22:02:46 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Software advice please Message-ID: Hello everyone, I have a query. So I'm going to be developing that http://nanohealththinktank.com/ website, which isn't up and running yet but I need some help trying to find the right forum software. What I am really looking for ~ is for it to be an easy to use visual WYSIWYG (remember that term), because I really don't want anything complicated or full of scripting this or that (really). I also don't need it to be one of those hosted forums or the dependency of it because I have my own domain and will be uploading via Dreamweaver. And while I am willing to pay for it, not anything unreasonable. As far as features go, I would like the usual modern message board where people can create their own profile and post comments, under various topics (I would like moderation controls). But I would also like there to be a chat room, but again not hosted, once I buy this stuff I want it to be mine forever. And a calendar or other interesting interactive features would be a nice bonus. Does anyone have any ideas for me? Thank you for any help you can provide : ) Gina "Nanogirl" Miller Nanotechnology Industries http://www.nanoindustries.com Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com This health stuff blog: http://ginamiller.blogspot.com/ Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ Craft blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ Foresight Senior Associate http://www.foresight.org Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kanzure at gmail.com Mon Jun 2 05:19:34 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2008 00:19:34 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Software advice please In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <200806020019.34748.kanzure@gmail.com> On Monday 02 June 2008, Gina Miller wrote: > Hello everyone, I have a query. So I'm going to be developing that > http://nanohealththinktank.com/ website, which isn't up and running > yet but I need some help trying to find the right forum software. http://phpbb.com/ - but make sure you use recaptcha (spam prevention) http://mediawiki.org/ - but make sure you use recaptcha Other options: 360Board - http://www.360Board.com/ Aborior's Encore - http://www.aborior.com/encore/index.shtml ASP-DEv Free Forums - http://forums.asp-dev.co.uk/ (hosted) ASP Playground.NET - http://www.aspplayground.net BBBoard - http://bb.bbboy.net/ (hosted) BeeBoard - http://www.beebalm.com/beeboard.html BoardServer - http://www.web-site-tools.com/boardse.htm (hosted) Burning Board - http://www.woltlab.de/ CuteCast - http://www.artscore.net/ Cyphor - http://www.cynox.ch/cyphor/ DCForum - http://www.dcscripts.com/dcforum.shtml DCForum+ - http://www.dcscripts.com/dcforump.shtml Discus - http://www.discusware.com/discus/index.php DK3 Discussion board - http://www.dk3.com/boardsystem/ (hosted) Eboards4all - http://www.eboards4all.com/ (hosted) Edge-Board - http://www.edgeboard.net/ ezboard - http://www.ezboard.com (hosted) ForumExperts - http://www.forumexperts.com/ (hosted) FUD - http://fud.prohost.org FuseTalk - http://www.fusetalk.com/ GuestForum - http://www.guestforum.com/ (hosted) He Bulletin Board - http://www.hescripts.com/ IdealBB - http://www.idealscience.com/site/default.aspx iHailStorm - http://inca.cc.uic.edu/ihailstorm/ihailstorm.php ikonboard - http://www.ikonboard.com/ Invision Board - http://www.invisionboard.com/ InvisionFree - http://www.invisionfree.com/ (hosted) Jive Forums - http://www.jivesoftware.com/products.jsp LokwaBB - http://lokwa.farcom.com/ MercuryBoard - http://www.mercuryboard.com/ miniBB - http://www.minibb.net/ myBB - http://mybboard.com/ MyIkonboard - http://www.myikonboard.com/intro.php (hosted) NavBoard - http://navarone.f2o.org netVillage - http://www.netvillage.com/homeframeset.html (hosted) Netzbrett - http://www.subjective.de/en/netzbrett/index.php OpenBB - http://www.openbb.com PBLang - http://pblang.drmartinus.de/ phpBB - http://www.phpbb.com/ Phorum - http://phorum.org/ POP Forums - http://popforums.cliquesite.com/ ProBoards - http://www.proboards.com (hosted) RPGBoard - http://www.resonatorsoft.org/software/rpgboard/ RobBoard - http://borschevsky.virtualave.net/ SmartBB - http://www.smartbb.net/ SmarTek - http://corp.smartek.net/boards.cfm SMB - http://www.simplemessageboard.com/ Snitz Forums 2000 - http://forum.snitz.com/ Sporum - http://www.sporum.org/ SowiBB - http://sowibb.sourceforge.net/ StarForums - http://on.starblvd.net/meet/ (hosted) SuddenLaunch - http://www.suddenlaunch.com/ (hosted) Tag Board - http://www.tag-board.com/ (hosted) tribbyBoard - http://www.tribby.com/board/ UBB Classic - http://www.infopop.com/products/ubbclassic/ UBB Threads - http://www.infopop.com/products/ubbthreads/ UBB.x - http://www.infopop.com/products/ubbx/ (hosted) UltraBoard - http://www.homepagetools.com/ultraboard/ (hosted) vBulletin - http://www.vbulletin.com/ VersiForum - http://www.versiforum.com/ VoyForums - http://www.voy.com/ (hosted) xsorbit - http://www.xsorbit.com/web/web_soft_messboard.html w-Agora - http://www.w-agora.net/en/index.php WebWiz - http://www.webwizguide.info/web_wiz_for ... p?mode=asp WWWBoard - http://www.scriptarchive.com/wwwboard.html XMB - http://www.xmbforum.com/ YaBB - http://www.yabbforum.com/ YaBB SE - http://www.yabb.info/ Yazd - http://yazd.yasna.com/ ZCom - http://zcom.frankoyer.com/cgi/index.cgi Zorum - http://www.zorum.com/ ZUBB - http://www.zope.org/Members/BwanaZulia/ZUBB > What I am really looking for ~ is for it to be an easy to use visual > WYSIWYG (remember that term), because I really don't want anything Try http://xstandard.com/ ? > complicated or full of scripting this or that (really). I also don't > need it to be one of those hosted ?forums or the dependency of it I agree. Avoid dependency issues. Especially dreamweaver or other commercial products. Also avoid frontpage. You could go with Open Office and use it to save HTML documents, but there are other options like xstandard.com and so on. > because I have my own domain and will be uploading via Dreamweaver. Woah, stop right there. You don't need to go as far as dreamweaver. Just go install a blogging system (wordpress) or a content management system, like drupal. http://wordpress.com/ http://drupal.org/ > And while I am willing to pay for it, not anything unreasonable. As You should pay at most $5/yr for the domain name, and the hosting could either be (1) a one-time $25 fee for an old computer, or (2) host with one of us. For example, if you're not expecting more than a few million hits a month, I could host you very easily. > far as features go, I would like the usual modern message board where > people can create their own profile and post comments, under various > topics (I would like moderation controls). But I would also like Those boards I listed above can do this. > there to be a chat room, but again not hosted, once I buy this stuff Chat rooms via IRC? http://irchelp.org/ You could run a server daemon process in the background, it's called 'ircd' (irc daemon), which does a server. This way anybody can connect through their own favorite clients, and you can provide a page on the site for people less fortunate (cgi irc gateway, easily Googleable). > I want it to be mine forever. And a calendar or other interesting I think drupal might do calendars. phpBB and other board systems definitely do. > interactive features would be a nice bonus. Does anyone have any > ideas for me? Thank you for any help you can provide : ) Hope that helps. - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Jun 2 06:04:29 2008 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2008 16:04:29 +1000 Subject: [ExI] The Total State In-Reply-To: <15A658C5E0B947699721C7E61566609C@ZANDRA2> References: <108201c8c37a$feea3f10$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <15A658C5E0B947699721C7E61566609C@ZANDRA2> Message-ID: 2008/6/2 Gary Miller : > The obvious answer based upon media events and my talking to coworkers who > come from Latin America and third world countries is: > > Unless you are rich, powerful, or know exactly who the perpetrator is it is > difficult to get any kind of investigation much less justice in these > countries. Leaving the US out, corruption rates would seem to be positively correlated with incarceration rates. In corrupt countries the rich and well-connected bribe officials while in less corrupt countries the rich and well-connected persuade public officials that their crimes aren't that bad (i.e. they have better lawyers). In both cases, it's mainly the relatively poor who end up in prison. I doubt that it's the criminals who can manipulate the system at home who would be first in line to emigrate. -- Stathis Papaioannou From spike66 at att.net Mon Jun 2 05:47:42 2008 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2008 22:47:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings In-Reply-To: <62c14240806011914u18e06d26x982eb0108e0cb289@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200806020614.m526EPjT013947@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > ...On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty ... > You meant boiling water IQ as in Fahrenheit? Because boiling > water IQ in Celsius is average by definition. > > "declare your units" :) Fahrenheit or celcius? I prefer to express mine in Rankine. Then one can have a boiling nitrogen IQ and still be smart as a whip. spike From nanogirl at halcyon.com Mon Jun 2 06:27:35 2008 From: nanogirl at halcyon.com (Gina Miller) Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2008 23:27:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Software advice please In-Reply-To: <200806020019.34748.kanzure@gmail.com> References: <200806020019.34748.kanzure@gmail.com> Message-ID: <7FC7D48B3F6E4011BD19CDEE7F06A9B4@GinaSony> That's such a long list (I'm impressed) that it would take me a long time to research and differentiate them all. As for dependencies I should have been more clear. If you Google "forum software" you end up at a lot of places that actually host what would be the forum on their server, so it wouldn't really be yours. I don't want that as I have my own server (it has virtual domains so I have many under one) and I already use Dreamweaver to create and upload my current webpages (which works very well for me) so I would like a forum program that could plug into Dreamweaver easily or if separate wouldn't be a problem importing for use into. I already own the domain name (http://nanohealththinktank.com/) that I want to host my forum on, so also not an issue. I hope I am explaining all of this correctly... if I could get one in the box program that has forum boards and chat room that would be the ticket. I'm all set with the other parts... Gina "Nanogirl" Miller Nanotechnology Industries http://www.nanoindustries.com Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com This health stuff blog: http://ginamiller.blogspot.com/ Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ Craft blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ Foresight Senior Associate http://www.foresight.org Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." ----- Original Message ----- From: Bryan Bishop To: ExI chat list Sent: Sunday, June 01, 2008 10:19 PM Subject: Re: [ExI] Software advice please On Monday 02 June 2008, Gina Miller wrote: > Hello everyone, I have a query. So I'm going to be developing that > http://nanohealththinktank.com/ website, which isn't up and running > yet but I need some help trying to find the right forum software. http://phpbb.com/ - but make sure you use recaptcha (spam prevention) http://mediawiki.org/ - but make sure you use recaptcha Other options: 360Board - http://www.360Board.com/ Aborior's Encore - http://www.aborior.com/encore/index.shtml ASP-DEv Free Forums - http://forums.asp-dev.co.uk/ (hosted) ASP Playground.NET - http://www.aspplayground.net BBBoard - http://bb.bbboy.net/ (hosted) BeeBoard - http://www.beebalm.com/beeboard.html BoardServer - http://www.web-site-tools.com/boardse.htm (hosted) Burning Board - http://www.woltlab.de/ CuteCast - http://www.artscore.net/ Cyphor - http://www.cynox.ch/cyphor/ DCForum - http://www.dcscripts.com/dcforum.shtml DCForum+ - http://www.dcscripts.com/dcforump.shtml Discus - http://www.discusware.com/discus/index.php DK3 Discussion board - http://www.dk3.com/boardsystem/ (hosted) Eboards4all - http://www.eboards4all.com/ (hosted) Edge-Board - http://www.edgeboard.net/ ezboard - http://www.ezboard.com (hosted) ForumExperts - http://www.forumexperts.com/ (hosted) FUD - http://fud.prohost.org FuseTalk - http://www.fusetalk.com/ GuestForum - http://www.guestforum.com/ (hosted) He Bulletin Board - http://www.hescripts.com/ IdealBB - http://www.idealscience.com/site/default.aspx iHailStorm - http://inca.cc.uic.edu/ihailstorm/ihailstorm.php ikonboard - http://www.ikonboard.com/ Invision Board - http://www.invisionboard.com/ InvisionFree - http://www.invisionfree.com/ (hosted) Jive Forums - http://www.jivesoftware.com/products.jsp LokwaBB - http://lokwa.farcom.com/ MercuryBoard - http://www.mercuryboard.com/ miniBB - http://www.minibb.net/ myBB - http://mybboard.com/ MyIkonboard - http://www.myikonboard.com/intro.php (hosted) NavBoard - http://navarone.f2o.org netVillage - http://www.netvillage.com/homeframeset.html (hosted) Netzbrett - http://www.subjective.de/en/netzbrett/index.php OpenBB - http://www.openbb.com PBLang - http://pblang.drmartinus.de/ phpBB - http://www.phpbb.com/ Phorum - http://phorum.org/ POP Forums - http://popforums.cliquesite.com/ ProBoards - http://www.proboards.com (hosted) RPGBoard - http://www.resonatorsoft.org/software/rpgboard/ RobBoard - http://borschevsky.virtualave.net/ SmartBB - http://www.smartbb.net/ SmarTek - http://corp.smartek.net/boards.cfm SMB - http://www.simplemessageboard.com/ Snitz Forums 2000 - http://forum.snitz.com/ Sporum - http://www.sporum.org/ SowiBB - http://sowibb.sourceforge.net/ StarForums - http://on.starblvd.net/meet/ (hosted) SuddenLaunch - http://www.suddenlaunch.com/ (hosted) Tag Board - http://www.tag-board.com/ (hosted) tribbyBoard - http://www.tribby.com/board/ UBB Classic - http://www.infopop.com/products/ubbclassic/ UBB Threads - http://www.infopop.com/products/ubbthreads/ UBB.x - http://www.infopop.com/products/ubbx/ (hosted) UltraBoard - http://www.homepagetools.com/ultraboard/ (hosted) vBulletin - http://www.vbulletin.com/ VersiForum - http://www.versiforum.com/ VoyForums - http://www.voy.com/ (hosted) xsorbit - http://www.xsorbit.com/web/web_soft_messboard.html w-Agora - http://www.w-agora.net/en/index.php WebWiz - http://www.webwizguide.info/web_wiz_for ... p?mode=asp WWWBoard - http://www.scriptarchive.com/wwwboard.html XMB - http://www.xmbforum.com/ YaBB - http://www.yabbforum.com/ YaBB SE - http://www.yabb.info/ Yazd - http://yazd.yasna.com/ ZCom - http://zcom.frankoyer.com/cgi/index.cgi Zorum - http://www.zorum.com/ ZUBB - http://www.zope.org/Members/BwanaZulia/ZUBB > What I am really looking for ~ is for it to be an easy to use visual > WYSIWYG (remember that term), because I really don't want anything Try http://xstandard.com/ ? > complicated or full of scripting this or that (really). I also don't > need it to be one of those hosted forums or the dependency of it I agree. Avoid dependency issues. Especially dreamweaver or other commercial products. Also avoid frontpage. You could go with Open Office and use it to save HTML documents, but there are other options like xstandard.com and so on. > because I have my own domain and will be uploading via Dreamweaver. Woah, stop right there. You don't need to go as far as dreamweaver. Just go install a blogging system (wordpress) or a content management system, like drupal. http://wordpress.com/ http://drupal.org/ > And while I am willing to pay for it, not anything unreasonable. As You should pay at most $5/yr for the domain name, and the hosting could either be (1) a one-time $25 fee for an old computer, or (2) host with one of us. For example, if you're not expecting more than a few million hits a month, I could host you very easily. > far as features go, I would like the usual modern message board where > people can create their own profile and post comments, under various > topics (I would like moderation controls). But I would also like Those boards I listed above can do this. > there to be a chat room, but again not hosted, once I buy this stuff Chat rooms via IRC? http://irchelp.org/ You could run a server daemon process in the background, it's called 'ircd' (irc daemon), which does a server. This way anybody can connect through their own favorite clients, and you can provide a page on the site for people less fortunate (cgi irc gateway, easily Googleable). > I want it to be mine forever. And a calendar or other interesting I think drupal might do calendars. phpBB and other board systems definitely do. > interactive features would be a nice bonus. Does anyone have any > ideas for me? Thank you for any help you can provide : ) Hope that helps. - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cetico.iconoclasta at gmail.com Mon Jun 2 12:18:44 2008 From: cetico.iconoclasta at gmail.com (Henrique Moraes Machado (CI)) Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2008 09:18:44 -0300 Subject: [ExI] The Total State References: <108201c8c37a$feea3f10$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <15A658C5E0B947699721C7E61566609C@ZANDRA2> Message-ID: <05dd01c8c4aa$ce5af110$fd00a8c0@cpdhemm> Gary> The obvious answer based upon media events and my talking to coworkers who > come from Latin America and third world countries is: > Unless you are rich, powerful, or know exactly who the perpetrator is it > is > difficult to get any kind of investigation much less justice in these > countries. > No investigation means no arrest, no conviction no incarceration, not even > a > crime occurrence recorded for statistic sake. > Also many criminals can make more money by joining the local police force, > or local warlord's militia accepting bribes, extorting money from people > running illegal businesses, and selling illegal drugs, money and > merchandise > confiscated as part of their official duties. > Of course if they keep the evidence and sell it they can't arrest the > prisoner and have them convicted for lack of evidence. No arrest no > incarceration. Of course they could kill the suspect but then wouldn't be > able to repeat the > confiscation of contraband next time. And in that case they still don't > show > up as an incarceration. > Also honest cops do not have a very long life expectency in these > countries. > In Mexico right being an honest law enforcement officer is like having a > bullseye on your back. >From Brasil here. Every word of this post is true. Unfortunately. From jonkc at bellsouth.net Mon Jun 2 13:45:12 2008 From: jonkc at bellsouth.net (John K Clark) Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2008 09:45:12 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings References: <20070210113413.GQ21677@leitl.org><005101c74da7$2168ec30$0a054e0c@MyComputer><7.0.1.0.2.20070211111725.0220a620@satx.rr.com><006801c74e0c$b600d370$59044e0c@MyComputer><7.0.1.0.2.20070211130148.02318940@satx.rr.com><002e01c74ec3$ee5eadc0$0f0b4e0c@MyComputer><45D09A16.4020908@goertzel.org><005a01c74ef1$0bc8eab0$3c064e0c@MyComputer><000301c8c34d$4877fba0$a9e61e97@archimede><010b01c8c3f6$735e7340$0301a8c0@MyComputer> <62c14240806011914u18e06d26x982eb0108e0cb289@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <001e01c8c4b6$e809d6b0$0301a8c0@MyComputer> "Mike Dougherty" > You meant boiling water IQ as in Fahrenheit? No Kelvin. John K Clark From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Jun 3 05:13:48 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2008 22:13:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Total State References: <108201c8c37a$feea3f10$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1212350818.16588.1919.camel@hayek> Message-ID: <117d01c8c538$be846fd0$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Fred writes > Can I strongly suggest that everyone slow down for a moment > and make sure that they are not coming conclusions that are not > supported. That's easier said than done! :-) In reality, of course, there are many different levels and extents to which "support" for some hypothesis or conclusion exists. But it's even more important to remember that at all times advancement proceeds evolutionarily, namely, that conjectures stand until refuted. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter how much justification can be mustered for an hypothesis or where it came from. What matters is whether it can be successfully assailed, and brought down by weight of evidence, quite the familiar axiom of Pan Critical Rationalism. > Consider that if persons in a lower socioeconomic level are > incarcerated at a higher rate than those at a different socioeconomic > level and if a demographic subgroup is disproportionally represented in > the lower socioeconomic level then members of the subgroup will likely > be incarcerated at a higher rate [even if they didn't commit more crime]. Very true. But the question immediately arises as to *how* significantly socioeconomic level by itself impacts incarceration rates---all other things being equal. And even if it turned out that it seemed to, would that factor automatically be more privileged than correspondingly well-studied factors on sensitive issues such as race, gender, or intelligence? The raw statistics in this case, of course, hardly help anyway since cause is not clear from effect, e.g., the criminal behavior and being poor could in some substantial part be caused by a third factor. > Thus merely looking any single factor alone might lead to unsubstantiated > conclusions. Thus the key indicator may not be a particular demographic > such as race or immigration status; it might be something else. Right. We can be almost sure that a number of factors will be involved, not just one, if for no other reason than that simple explanations (pace extreme bias against them from cultural sources) would have likely already been agreed upon, with the debate having shifted elsewhere. > I strongly suggest we all try to maintain high standards in our analysis. That's a pretty good idea! And also, we all should also maintain high standards in the care with which we write our posts; in fact, the more I think about it, it's pretty sensible to maintain high standards in almost everything, except for the purely frivolous. We could just have fun! In which case no effort at all would be needed! :-) > One thing I try to do is to see if I have incorporated some idea > such as racial and ethnic differences uncritically into my analysis > when other factors may provide a better understanding of the > issue under consideration. That is very true. In fact, we should try to avoid uncritically incorporating *any* suppositions into our analyses. I get the feeling from the wording of that, however, that perhaps racial and ethnic differences are explanations to be taken if not as a last resort, then at least to be appealed to only after more privileged ones. For example, let's suppose that we were a group of detectives debating whether or not one of our suspects were implicated in the crime and someone said, "One thing I suggest we do is to see if we have incorporated some idea such as DNA testing uncritically into our analysis when other factors may provide a better understanding of the issue under consideration." Again, that would be perfectly true. But it would also indicate a certain a priori skepticism on the part of the speaker towards DNA testing (which might or might not be warranted depending on the decade during which the investigation was taking place). In other words, why exactly did the speaker pick out DNA testing to use in an otherwise perfectly valid generalization? We must also always keep well in mind that some kinds of explanation hurt people's feelings more than do others. For example, in the 19th century religious sensibilities were often deeply offended by conjectures concerning geology and the age of the Earth. But in addition to merely hurting people's feelings, it can easily be the case that were the public to accept certain truths, it could have demoralizing effects. Conceivably, we could be better off not knowing certain things. Thus these two phenomena---our distaste towards hurting people's feelings and our fear of causing social turmoil ---can easily, even unconsciously, conspire to push certain kinds of conjecture or explanation out of consideration. But on a forum such as this, where the truth is the *only* thing we care about, such squeamishness definitely has to be put aside. Therefore we must always endeavor, at least here, to say exactly what we think could be the truth, regardless of other considerations, and let the criticism fall where it may. It's not easy, of course, but throughout history the path of progress has never been easy---or necessarily comfortable. Lee From sjatkins at mac.com Tue Jun 3 05:57:46 2008 From: sjatkins at mac.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Samantha=A0_Atkins?=) Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2008 22:57:46 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Fwd: [wta-talk] The Singularity - A Dissent References: Message-ID: <9FA3DD6C-3414-4006-AA88-BAB1B9C3E9E5@mac.com> Begin forwarded message: > From: Samantha Atkins > Date: June 2, 2008 10:56:20 PM PDT > To: World Transhumanist Association Discussion List > > Subject: Re: [wta-talk] The Singularity - A Dissent > > > On Jun 2, 2008, at 5:25 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > >>> >> >> In the possibility space of all AI's, there will be some that will >> manage our affairs better than we could. But the two problems are how >> to recognise which ones these will be, and how to prevent people from >> building other AI's that they believe will further their selfish >> interests. In the case of nuclear weapons only a few have access to >> them, and it is obvious even to a stupid person how dangerous they >> can >> be. Neither of these things is certain about AI research. > > I am rather depressed to admit that I find worries about AGI much > less compelling of late. The reason is that it seems more certain > to me by the day that humans are far too relatively stupid and bound > hopelessly by their evolutionary programming to pose much of a > threat of any sort of real transcendence or building that which will > transcend or is even the seed of such. We take too long to mature > only to decay too rapidly. We spend most of our energies, even many > of the best and brightest of us in exceedingly mundane activities > and concerns. Even the best of us seem quite poor at consistent > high quality thinking much less action on any significant scale of > cooperating individuals. Our organizations, no matter how high- > minded in stated intent, are mired in common monkey feces slinging > to such an extent that very little of real value gets done or can > get done. I am hoping it is a passing melancholy. But of late > this is very sadly how this all too human world of ours looks to > me. Perhaps it is only or mostly what I see in the mirror and > perhaps harshly. Perhaps many live on a different level. But I am > not seeing the evidence this is so and I would very much like to. > > - samantha > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefan.pernar at gmail.com Tue Jun 3 07:51:59 2008 From: stefan.pernar at gmail.com (Stefan Pernar) Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2008 15:51:59 +0800 Subject: [ExI] Fwd: [wta-talk] The Singularity - A Dissent In-Reply-To: <9FA3DD6C-3414-4006-AA88-BAB1B9C3E9E5@mac.com> References: <9FA3DD6C-3414-4006-AA88-BAB1B9C3E9E5@mac.com> Message-ID: <944947f20806030051t5cdcefc1nc56e70bc33425d@mail.gmail.com> On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 1:57 PM, Samantha Atkins wrote: > *From: *Samantha Atkins > *Date: *June 2, 2008 10:56:20 PM PDT > *To: *World Transhumanist Association Discussion List < > wta-talk at transhumanism.org> > *Subject: **Re: [wta-talk] The Singularity - A Dissent* > > On Jun 2, 2008, at 5:25 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > In the possibility space of all AI's, there will be some that will > > manage our affairs better than we could. But the two problems are how > > to recognise which ones these will be, and how to prevent people from > > building other AI's that they believe will further their selfish > > interests. In the case of nuclear weapons only a few have access to > > them, and it is obvious even to a stupid person how dangerous they can > > be. Neither of these things is certain about AI research. > > I am rather depressed to admit that I find worries about AGI much less > compelling of late. The reason is that it seems more certain to me by the > day that humans are far too relatively stupid and bound hopelessly by their > evolutionary programming to pose much of a threat of any sort of real > transcendence or building that which will transcend or is even the seed of > such. We take too long to mature only to decay too rapidly. We spend most > of our energies, even many of the best and brightest of us in exceedingly > mundane activities and concerns. Even the best of us seem quite poor at > consistent high quality thinking much less action on any significant scale > of cooperating individuals. Our organizations, no matter how high-minded in > stated intent, are mired in common monkey feces slinging to such an extent > that very little of real value gets done or can get done. I am hoping it > is a passing melancholy. But of late this is very sadly how this all too > human world of ours looks to me. Perhaps it is only or mostly what I see > in the mirror and perhaps harshly. Perhaps many live on a different level. > But I am not seeing the evidence this is so and I would very much like to. > > - samantha > > I could not agree more on your evolutionary thoughts but unlike you I see hope. I suggest you go and check Evolution's Arrow by John Stewart ( http://users.tpg.com.au/users/jes999/) - very uplifting and inspiring reading. Cheers, Stefan -- Stefan Pernar 3-E-101 Silver Maple Garden #6 Cai Hong Road, Da Shan Zi Chao Yang District 100015 Beijing P.R. CHINA Mobil: +86 1391 009 1931 Skype: Stefan.Pernar -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kevinfreels at insightbb.com Tue Jun 3 16:50:29 2008 From: kevinfreels at insightbb.com (Kevin Freels) Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:50:29 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Software advice please In-Reply-To: <7FC7D48B3F6E4011BD19CDEE7F06A9B4@GinaSony> References: <200806020019.34748.kanzure@gmail.com> <7FC7D48B3F6E4011BD19CDEE7F06A9B4@GinaSony> Message-ID: <48457655.8010907@insightbb.com> Gina Miller wrote: > > That's such a long list (I'm impressed) that it would take me a long > time to research and differentiate them all. As for dependencies I > should have been more clear. If you Google "forum software" you end up > at a lot of places that actually host what would be the forum on their > server, so it wouldn't really be yours. I don't want that as I have my > own server (it has virtual domains so I have many under one) and > I already use Dreamweaver to create and upload my > current webpages (which works very well for me) so I would like a > forum program that could plug into Dreamweaver easily or if separate > wouldn't be a problem importing for use into. I already own the domain > name (http://nanohealththinktank.com/) that I want to host my forum > on, so also not an issue. I hope I am explaining all of this > correctly... if I could get one in the box program that has forum > boards and chat room that would be the ticket. I'm all set with the > other parts... > > Gina "Nanogirl" Miller > Nanotechnology Industries > http://www.nanoindustries.com > Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com > This health stuff blog: http://ginamiller.blogspot.com/ > Animation Blog: http://maxanimation.blogspot.com/ > Craft blog: http://nanogirlblog.blogspot.com/ > Foresight Senior Associate http://www.foresight.org > Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org > Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com > "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." > > ----- Original Message ----- > *From:* Bryan Bishop > *To:* ExI chat list > *Sent:* Sunday, June 01, 2008 10:19 PM > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Software advice please > > On Monday 02 June 2008, Gina Miller wrote: > > Hello everyone, I have a query. So I'm going to be developing that > > http://nanohealththinktank.com/ website, which isn't up and running > > yet but I need some help trying to find the right forum software. > > http://phpbb.com/ - but make sure you use recaptcha (spam prevention) > http://mediawiki.org/ - but make sure you use recaptcha > > Other options: > > 360Board - http://www.360Board.com/ > Aborior's Encore - http://www.aborior.com/encore/index.shtml > ASP-DEv Free Forums - http://forums.asp-dev.co.uk/ (hosted) > ASP Playground.NET - http://www.aspplayground.net > BBBoard - http://bb.bbboy.net/ (hosted) > BeeBoard - http://www.beebalm.com/beeboard.html > BoardServer - http://www.web-site-tools.com/boardse.htm (hosted) > Burning Board - http://www.woltlab.de/ > CuteCast - http://www.artscore.net/ > Cyphor - http://www.cynox.ch/cyphor/ > DCForum - http://www.dcscripts.com/dcforum.shtml > DCForum+ - http://www.dcscripts.com/dcforump.shtml > Discus - http://www.discusware.com/discus/index.php > DK3 Discussion board - http://www.dk3.com/boardsystem/ (hosted) > Eboards4all - http://www.eboards4all.com/ (hosted) > Edge-Board - http://www.edgeboard.net/ > ezboard - http://www.ezboard.com (hosted) > ForumExperts - http://www.forumexperts.com/ (hosted) > FUD - http://fud.prohost.org > FuseTalk - http://www.fusetalk.com/ > GuestForum - http://www.guestforum.com/ (hosted) > He Bulletin Board - http://www.hescripts.com/ > IdealBB - http://www.idealscience.com/site/default.aspx > iHailStorm - http://inca.cc.uic.edu/ihailstorm/ihailstorm.php > ikonboard - http://www.ikonboard.com/ > Invision Board - http://www.invisionboard.com/ > InvisionFree - http://www.invisionfree.com/ (hosted) > Jive Forums - http://www.jivesoftware.com/products.jsp > LokwaBB - http://lokwa.farcom.com/ > MercuryBoard - http://www.mercuryboard.com/ > miniBB - http://www.minibb.net/ > myBB - http://mybboard.com/ > MyIkonboard - http://www.myikonboard.com/intro.php (hosted) > NavBoard - http://navarone.f2o.org > netVillage - http://www.netvillage.com/homeframeset.html (hosted) > Netzbrett - http://www.subjective.de/en/netzbrett/index.php > OpenBB - http://www.openbb.com > PBLang - http://pblang.drmartinus.de/ > phpBB - http://www.phpbb.com/ > Phorum - http://phorum.org/ > POP Forums - http://popforums.cliquesite.com/ > ProBoards - http://www.proboards.com (hosted) > RPGBoard - http://www.resonatorsoft.org/software/rpgboard/ > RobBoard - http://borschevsky.virtualave.net/ > SmartBB - http://www.smartbb.net/ > SmarTek - http://corp.smartek.net/boards.cfm > SMB - http://www.simplemessageboard.com/ > Snitz Forums 2000 - http://forum.snitz.com/ > Sporum - http://www.sporum.org/ > SowiBB - http://sowibb.sourceforge.net/ > StarForums - http://on.starblvd.net/meet/ (hosted) > SuddenLaunch - http://www.suddenlaunch.com/ (hosted) > Tag Board - http://www.tag-board.com/ (hosted) > tribbyBoard - http://www.tribby.com/board/ > UBB Classic - http://www.infopop.com/products/ubbclassic/ > UBB Threads - http://www.infopop.com/products/ubbthreads/ > UBB.x - http://www.infopop.com/products/ubbx/ (hosted) > UltraBoard - http://www.homepagetools.com/ultraboard/ (hosted) > vBulletin - http://www.vbulletin.com/ > VersiForum - http://www.versiforum.com/ > VoyForums - http://www.voy.com/ (hosted) > xsorbit - http://www.xsorbit.com/web/web_soft_messboard.html > w-Agora - http://www.w-agora.net/en/index.php > WebWiz - http://www.webwizguide.info/web_wiz_for ... p?mode=asp > WWWBoard - http://www.scriptarchive.com/wwwboard.html > XMB - http://www.xmbforum.com/ > YaBB - http://www.yabbforum.com/ > YaBB SE - http://www.yabb.info/ > Yazd - http://yazd.yasna.com/ > ZCom - http://zcom.frankoyer.com/cgi/index.cgi > Zorum - http://www.zorum.com/ > ZUBB - http://www.zope.org/Members/BwanaZulia/ZUBB > > > What I am really looking for ~ is for it to be an easy to use visual > > WYSIWYG (remember that term), because I really don't want anything > > Try http://xstandard.com/ ? > > > complicated or full of scripting this or that (really). I also don't > > need it to be one of those hosted forums or the dependency of it > > I agree. Avoid dependency issues. Especially dreamweaver or other > commercial products. Also avoid frontpage. You could go with Open > Office and use it to save HTML documents, but there are other options > like xstandard.com and so on. > > > because I have my own domain and will be uploading via Dreamweaver. > > Woah, stop right there. You don't need to go as far as > dreamweaver. Just > go install a blogging system (wordpress) or a content management > system, like drupal. > > http://wordpress.com/ > http://drupal.org/ > > > And while I am willing to pay for it, not anything unreasonable. As > > You should pay at most $5/yr for the domain name, and the hosting > could > either be (1) a one-time $25 fee for an old computer, or (2) host > with > one of us. For example, if you're not expecting more than a few > million > hits a month, I could host you very easily. > > > far as features go, I would like the usual modern message board > where > > people can create their own profile and post comments, under various > > topics (I would like moderation controls). But I would also like > > Those boards I listed above can do this. > > > there to be a chat room, but again not hosted, once I buy this stuff > > Chat rooms via IRC? http://irchelp.org/ > You could run a server daemon process in the background, it's > called 'ircd' (irc daemon), which does a server. This way anybody can > connect through their own favorite clients, and you can provide a > page > on the site for people less fortunate (cgi irc gateway, easily > Googleable). > > > I want it to be mine forever. And a calendar or other interesting > > I think drupal might do calendars. phpBB and other board systems > definitely do. > > > interactive features would be a nice bonus. Does anyone have any > > ideas for me? Thank you for any help you can provide : ) > > Hope that helps. > > - Bryan > ________________________________________ > http://heybryan.org/ > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > You may want to also look into building a Joomla website and use a forum module. There's a steep learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, it's a nice way to be able to manage content. Best of all, it's free and open source. www.joomla.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pgptag at gmail.com Tue Jun 3 18:15:36 2008 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2008 20:15:36 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Software advice please In-Reply-To: <48457655.8010907@insightbb.com> References: <200806020019.34748.kanzure@gmail.com> <7FC7D48B3F6E4011BD19CDEE7F06A9B4@GinaSony> <48457655.8010907@insightbb.com> Message-ID: <470a3c520806031115x630ce23dw1880b700fa2b025d@mail.gmail.com> On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 6:50 PM, Kevin Freels wrote: > > You may want to also look into building a Joomla website and use a forum > module. There's a steep learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, > it's a nice way to be able to manage content. Best of all, it's free and > open source. www.joomla.org Joomla is nice and reasonably easy to install and use. I still prefer Expression Engine, it comes with blogging and forum modules and many other things. Mediawiki is also easy to install and use. G. From estropico at gmail.com Wed Jun 4 00:56:47 2008 From: estropico at gmail.com (estropico) Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2008 01:56:47 +0100 Subject: [ExI] ExtroBritannia's June event: Technology risks and the survival of humanity Message-ID: <4eaaa0d90806031756y11a347efr2be26aded3817688@mail.gmail.com> Technology risks and the survival of humanity: Is emerging technology more likely to destroy human civilisation or to radically enhance it? The next ExtroBritannia event is scheduled for Saturday the 14th of June 2008, 2pm-4pm. Venue: Room 539 (fifth floor), Birkbeck College, Torrington Square, London WC1E 7HX. The event is free and everyone's welcome. This meeting previews and summarises some of the discussions that will be taking place in July at the (four day long) conference "Global Catastrophic Risks" that will be taking place in Oxford in July (http://www.global-catastrophic-risks.com/) This is arguably the single most important topic that can ever be discussed! Risks worthy of review include: *) Runaway greenhouse effects and other drastic climate change - vs possible geo-engineering solutions and new, cleaner, sources of energy *) Nuclear wars provoked by catastrophic nuclear terrorism *) Supervolcanoes - potentially tamed by future super-strong nanomaterials *) A global pandemic of some horrible new disease *) Hazards from comets and asteroids *) The emergence of malevolent super-AI - vs the chance that super-AI will allow us to find better solutions to our existential risks Speakers who will lead the discussion include: Julian Snape - looking at technology risks and solutions from the point of view of both nanotechnology and possible collisions from NEOs (Near Earth Objects - comets and asteroids) John Dinsdale - looking at technology risks and solutions around Global Warming, Peak Energy (fossil fuel,nuclear) and EROEI (energy return on energy invested) Join the debate! Venue: Birkbeck College - Room 539, 5th floor, Main Building, Torrington Square (which is a pedestrian-only square), London WC1E 7HX ? MAP: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/maps The nearest tube station is Russell Square. Come out of the tube station and turn left, to walk west along Bernard St. Cross over Herbrand St then Woburn Place and keep walking westwards, on the north side of the square. Cross Bedford Way, and turn right into Thornhaugh St, then immediately left to enter Torrington Square through the pedestrian-only courtyard outside SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies). Veer right and you'll see the main entrance to Birkbeck College on the left as you walk up Torrington Square. Take the lift to the 5th floor and follow the signs to room 539. Discussion is likely to continue after the event in a nearby pub, for those who are able to stay. There's also the option of joining some of the UKTA regulars for drinks/lunch beforehand, starting c. 12.30, in "The Friend At Hand" pub which is situated behind Russell Square tube station on Herbrand Street. If it's your first ExtroBritannia look out for a copy of Ending Aging on display on our table. Keep an eye on our mailing list and blog for updates: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extrobritannia/ http://extrobritannia.blogspot.com/ Cheers, Fabio From andres at thoughtware.tv Wed Jun 4 03:03:19 2008 From: andres at thoughtware.tv (Andres Colon) Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2008 23:03:19 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Thoughtware.TV: Technological Memes Message-ID: I have to recommend you to watch this talk by Susan Blackmore, on the subject of Memes and "temes". http://www.thoughtware.tv/videos/watch/2191 "Psychologist/memeticist Susan Blackmore proposes that there's a new layer of "selfish", evolving replicators in the making: just like cognitive replicators (memes) came into existence at some point during genetic evolution, relying on the genetic layer for their continued existence/replication but also controlling it to a certain degree, now 'temes' (technological replicators) are emerging as a product of genetic-memetic evolution, to rely on both genes and memes for their survival/replication, while becoming more and more able to also exert control over both these layers." This kind contribution was added by Donjoe, community member at Thoughtware.TV Andres, President of Thoughtware.TV -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Thu Jun 5 01:27:44 2008 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2008 18:27:44 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Technology advances replicators Message-ID: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=5935.php ======================================= Posted: June 3, 2008 Prototype of machine that copies itself goes on show (*Nanowerk News*) Granted, this is not nanotechnology yet, but quite an interesting development nevertheless: A University of Bath academic, who oversees a global effort to develop an open-source machine that 'prints' three-dimensional objects, is celebrating after the prototype machine succeeded in making a set of its own printed parts. The machine, named RepRap , will be exhibited publicly at the Cheltenham Science Festival (June 4-8, 2008). RepRap is short for replicating rapid-prototyper; it employs a technique called 'additive fabrication'. The machine works a bit like a printer, but, rather than squirting ink onto paper, it puts down thin layers of molten plastic which solidify. These layers are built up to make useful 3D objects. [image: RepRap] RepRap has, so far, been capable of making everyday plastic goods such as door handles,sandals and coat hooks. Now, the machine has also succeeded in copying all its own 3D-printed parts. These parts have been printed and assembled by RepRap team member, Vik Olliver, in Auckland, New Zealand, into a new RepRap machine that can replicate the same set of parts for yet another RepRap machine and so on ad infinitum. While 3D printers have been available commercially for about 25 years, RepRap is the first that can essentially print itself. The RepRap research and development project was conceived, and is directed, by Dr Adrian Bowyer, a senior lecturer in engineering in the Faculty of Engineering & Design at the University of Bath, UK. Dr Bowyer said that: "These days, most people in the developed world run a professional-quality print works, photographic lab and CD-pressing plant in their own house, all courtesy of their home PC. Why shouldn't they also run their own desktop factory capable of making many of the things they presently buy in shops, too? "The possibilities are endless. Now, people can make exactly what they want. If the design of an existing object does not quite suit their needs, they can easily redesign it on their PC and print that out, instead of making do with a mass-produced second-best design from the shops. They can also print out extra RepRap printers to give to their friends. Then those friends can make what they want too." R ecently, Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager at Google Inc, encouraged people to: "Think of RepRap as a China on your desktop." Sir James Dyson, Chief Executive of the Dyson Group, said: "RepRap is a different, revolutionary way of approaching invention. It could allow people to change the ergonomics of a design to their own specific needs." Dr Bowyer hopes people will come to the Cheltenham Science Festival and see both the 'parent' and the 'child' RepRap machines in action for the first time together. "RepRap is the most enjoyable research project I've ever run," he said. "Without the many talented and selfless volunteers the RepRap project has all round the world, it would have never succeeded so quickly." Complete plans for the prototype RepRap 3D printer and detailed tutorials to aid motivated amateurs (and professionals) in assembling one are available, free-of-charge, at the RepRap website (details below). The materials, plus the minority of parts that the machine cannot print, cost about ?300. All those non-printed parts can be bought at hardware shops or from online stores. Dr Bowyer and several of the other Reprap team members will be available to answer questions and exhibit the parent and child RepRap printers in operation at the Cheltenham Science Festival from June 4-8, 2008. Source: *University of Bath* From scerir at libero.it Thu Jun 5 14:18:09 2008 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 16:18:09 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings References: <20070210113413.GQ21677@leitl.org><000601c74d36$14b5a5d0$80bd1f97@archimede><20070210182045.GF21677@leitl.org><3cf171fe0702101031y61274711hde9a72a2eb2e31ba@mail.gmail.com><20070210184954.GI21677@leitl.org><3cf171fe0702101223t1a3884bdqf57c6677ae95ee1e@mail.gmail.com><005101c74da7$2168ec30$0a054e0c@MyComputer><7.0.1.0.2.20070211111725.0220a620@satx.rr.com><006801c74e0c$b600d370$59044e0c@MyComputer> <7.0.1.0.2.20070211130148.02318940@satx.rr.com><002e01c74ec3$ee5eadc0$0f0b4e0c@MyComputer><45D09A16.4020908@goertzel.org><005a01c74ef1$0bc8eab0$3c064e0c@MyComputer><000301c8c34d$4877fba0$a9e61e97@archimede> <010b01c8c3f6$735e7340$0301a8c0@MyComputer> Message-ID: <003201c8c716$fcdd2b20$4ee51e97@archimede> Cold fusion seems to be a real "effect". But the question is: whatever the (unknown) reaction [1], is there a measurable *excess* energy? To my knowledge [2], this measurement (heat, radiation, etc.) isn't easy at all. [1] There is a number of previously unknown reactions, in that field, in example see: http://www.aip.org/pnu/2008/split/865-2.html [2] Somebody pointed out the same thing here (scroll down) if I remember well http://www.physorg.com/news131101595.html From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Jun 5 17:55:58 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:55:58 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The New Milky Way Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080605124912.0240b848@satx.rr.com> from the blog of Adam Crowl, astronomer: The New Milky Way June 4th, 2008 The latest view of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, can be found at the Spitzer Infra-Red Space Telescope?s newspages here The New Galaxy seems we?re now officially a few galactic arms short - two arms based on old hydrogen-based maps aren?t evidenced by actual star-counts and thus were an artefact of the limitations of hydrogen-based radio astronomy. The Galaxy is still a BIG place, but it looks more like a pretty barred spiral galaxy than a relatively dull ?grand-design? flocculent spiral like it did in the old maps. But why are spiral arms the way they are? It?s a puzzle, but one astrophysicists have no end of good ideas about - and then along come some new surprises, like this one Black Hole Mass determines tightness of the Spiral seems the heftier the central Black Hole, the tighter the spiral arms. In our Local Group there are three big Spirals - ours, M31 (in Andromeda) and M33 (in Triangulum) - and the central Black Hole masses 4 million Solar masses (for the Milky Way), 180 million for M31, and just 1,500 for M33. M33 is a pretty loose spiral, though pretty. Andromeda?s M31 is tightly wound, from what we can see as M31 is tilted away from us. SO the Milky Way is somewhere between the two. But why the correlation? Dark Matter? Weird gravity lanes? Something in hyperspace? Who knows? And that?s why astronomy is both fun and worth doing From artillo at comcast.net Thu Jun 5 18:10:50 2008 From: artillo at comcast.net (artillo at comcast.net) Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:10:50 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Air-powered cars Message-ID: <060520081810.11208.48482C2A000EA52700002BC82206999735010404079B9D0E@comcast.net> Strangely enough, this is the first I've heard of this: http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1260/ what a shame we in the USA have to wait for such a thing to come around. Seems like a really simple idea, maybe I'll build one myself LOL From jrd1415 at gmail.com Thu Jun 5 22:21:13 2008 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 15:21:13 -0700 Subject: [ExI] dark matter (and -- shhhh! -- the F**** p-dox) Message-ID: Here's the deal. The talk about dark matter uses terms like "non-baryonic", and otherwise asserts that dark matter is distinctly different from regular matter. But I have yet to find any evidence for the it-ain't-regular-matter presumption. The entire case, as far as I have been able to determine, comes from the fact that the "matter" in question is "dark". That, unlike "regular" matter, it can't be seen; that it doesn't emit any light or other EM; that it doesn't do what "regular" matter does, ie form cosmic dust clouds, stars, planets, galaxies, etc. The only actual, substantive, tangible thing that it does -- and which is the totality of evidence (that I have been able to find) establishing it's existence -- is its gravitational effect. And as far as I can tell, this is just, well.., you know, "regular" gravity. Not some special sort of dark matter gravity. So what's up? Did I miss something? Do any of youse guys know something more about this "dark stuff" -- other than that its dark? Something that would rise to the level of actual evidence that "dark matter" is not just regular matter that is well, you know,... dark? [Shhhhhh. Avert you eye's. Scroll past this next bit real quick like. Don't read it. And don't say anything if you do.] In discussions of the Fermi paradox Eugen L and John Clark have forcefully taken the position that if technologically adept space-faring civilizations were abundant in the universe, then at least one would have invented Von Neuman probes, and that we would "see" evidence in the form of cosmic engineering. At the same time Robert B., in related discussions re cosmic engineering, ie computronium-mediated matrioshka brains, Dyson spheres, etc, has made the point that, for most efficient energy use, a prime location for such structures would be in the darkness between stars. There, the outermost of the nested shells --each shell harvests the "waste" energy radiated from the inner adjacent shell -- that last, outermost shell dumps its waste heat into the cosmos at a temperature as close as feasible to the cosmic background radiation. Wouldn't such engineered structures, so located, be exceedingly dark? So is it utterly unreasonable to point to the so-called "dark matter", currently calculated to comprise 85-90 percent of the mass of the universe, and say, "There's your engineered universe, guys. Complete with 10-15 percent "green" space."? I don't know. My pre-singularity chimpy brain can't figure it out. I even put on a snazzy white lab coat and stood near an array of brushed-aluminum-fronted lab instruments with digital displays that made little beeping sounds, but it didn't help. Enhance me, please. Best, Jeff Davis Aspiring Transhuman / Delusional Ape (Take your pick) Nicq MacDonald From amara at amara.com Thu Jun 5 22:43:58 2008 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 16:43:58 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Cruisin' New Horizons Message-ID: In two days, New Horizons passes the orbit of Saturn (~10 AU). As you might recall, it was only the end of February 2007 (that's right, _last_ year), that it passed Jupiter (~5 AU). It's zippin' at 65,803 km/h. Only the two tiny Helios spacecraft (mid-70s 250,000 km/h) breaks the record as the fastest manmade objects ever flown. See the data for New Horizon's trajectory here: http://www.dmuller.net/newhorizons/ Just 2594 days and 17 minutes to Pluto! ;-) Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado From spike66 at att.net Fri Jun 6 01:01:53 2008 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 18:01:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Air-powered cars In-Reply-To: <060520081810.11208.48482C2A000EA52700002BC82206999735010404079B9D0E@comcast.net> Message-ID: <200806060128.m561SXCM027764@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > ... On Behalf Of artillo at comcast.net > Strangely enough, this is the first I've heard of this: > > http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1260/ > > what a shame we in the USA have to wait for such a thing to > come around. > Seems like a really simple idea, maybe I'll build one myself > LOL Do the calcs first Artillo. They say a little more than one horsepower, then make the absurd claim of 70 mph for 120 miles. I can *guarantee you* those numbers are wrong. Perhaps they dropped a decimal point twice: I would believe a top speed of 7 miles per hour for 12 miles. Whenever one looks at the alternative means of hauling apes, one always comes away with a new respect for good old gasoline. spike From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Fri Jun 6 02:22:46 2008 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 19:22:46 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Air-powered cars In-Reply-To: <200806060128.m561SXCM027764@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <060520081810.11208.48482C2A000EA52700002BC82206999735010404079B9D0E@comcast.net> <200806060128.m561SXCM027764@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: On 6/5/08, spike wrote: snip > > Whenever one looks at the alternative means of hauling apes, one always > comes away with a new respect for good old gasoline. Indeed. So what do we need for carbon neutral synthetic gasoline? At a recent conference a guy had worked out the numbers to suck carbon dioxide out of the air and combine it with hydrogen in a reverse combustion industrial operation. He got 79kWh/gallon. I have confidence in that number because the energy in a gallon of gasoline is about 38 kWh and this number is close to twice that. So if you want gasoline for about a dollar a gallon, you can do it on a megascale if you can get massive power in the penny or sub penny per kWh. If you assume 2kg/kW power sats and work the numbers backwards from penny a kWh, you can afford about $75/kg for the lift cost to GEO. That's easy with a space elevator, which takes about 15 cents of electricity and (if it cost $100 billion) a capital charge of $12.50/kg for an 800,000 ton per year delivery model. Reuseable heavy lift launch vehicles will do that for an incremental cost of about $300 a kg split between $1.5 billion for the rocket and $1.5 billion for operations. In 100 flights, a single rocket delievers 10,000 tons to GEO. ($3 billion/0.01 B kg) I have a proposal out to reduce this cost to at least 1/3 and perhaps 1/6. I don't want to make it public just yet, but if you feel up to checking assumptions and my math, ask and I will send you a copy. Keith Henson From kevin.l.holmes at gmail.com Fri Jun 6 03:59:27 2008 From: kevin.l.holmes at gmail.com (Kevin H) Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 20:59:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cruisin' New Horizons In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 3:43 PM, Amara Graps wrote: > > In two days, New Horizons passes the orbit of Saturn (~10 AU). As you > might recall, it was only the end of February 2007 (that's right, _last_ > year), that it passed Jupiter (~5 AU). It's zippin' at 65,803 km/h. Only > the two tiny Helios spacecraft (mid-70s 250,000 km/h) breaks the record > as the fastest manmade objects ever flown. > > See the data for New Horizon's trajectory here: > http://www.dmuller.net/newhorizons/ > > Just 2594 days and 17 minutes to Pluto! ;-) > > Amara Cool site, Amara. I used to track New Horizons on the NASA page ( http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/whereis_nh.php) but then I got out of the habit for some reason. But, I definitely think it is a cool program and at last we'll see the last former planet up close, and I won't even have to wait until I'm thawed out from my cryogenic slumber :) Kevin -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kevin.l.holmes at gmail.com Fri Jun 6 04:23:41 2008 From: kevin.l.holmes at gmail.com (Kevin H) Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 21:23:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Air-powered cars In-Reply-To: References: <060520081810.11208.48482C2A000EA52700002BC82206999735010404079B9D0E@comcast.net> <200806060128.m561SXCM027764@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 7:22 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > On 6/5/08, spike wrote: > > snip > > > > Whenever one looks at the alternative means of hauling apes, one always > > comes away with a new respect for good old gasoline. > > Indeed. > > So what do we need for carbon neutral synthetic gasoline? > > At a recent conference a guy had worked out the numbers to suck carbon > dioxide out of the air and combine it with hydrogen in a reverse > combustion industrial operation. That's an interesting idea, but how exactly is this done? But I agree with the premise: gasoline is far more energy dense than electric batteries will ever be. This really hit home when I was reading about the proposed specs of the upcoming Chevrolet Volt. It's 16 kWh battery, when fully charged, gives it a 40 mile range. But it has a gasoline "range extender" that does nothing but recharge the battery, attaining a range of 640 miles. It's an excellent step, I think, which is what is going to be needed in an energy-scarce world, so that people can choose which way they want to fuel their cars based on existing prices. Right now, electricity is cheaper than gasoline per mile, but with a large number of electric vehicles on the road the price of electricity might go up. Ah well, no such thing as a free lunch. Kevin -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pgptag at gmail.com Fri Jun 6 09:18:07 2008 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 11:18:07 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Conference Report: The Future of Religions - Religions of the Future - Second Life, June 4, 5 Message-ID: <470a3c520806060218o3307d81me03160e1202aa4a6@mail.gmail.com> Conference Report: The Future of Religions - Religions of the Future - Second Life, June 4, 5 http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/conference_report_the_future_of_religions_religions_of_the_future_second_li/ Full text of my talk with SL chatlog http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/my_talk_at_the_conference_the_future_of_religions_religions_of_the_future/ From mfj.eav at gmail.com Fri Jun 6 15:19:22 2008 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 08:19:22 -0700 Subject: [ExI] longevity dividend course OP-ED assignment 01 Message-ID: <61c8738e0806060819o663fe396xe335aedf2b417fb7@mail.gmail.com> LIVING HEALTHIER AND LONGER Hey Kids , are you ready for anti-aging / regenerative medicine? "Get real Dad, be serious, act your age, get over your midlife crisis , there is no such as anti-aging medicine , you are going to die sooner than you think so quit wasting your time and focus on making your last years as comfortable as possible" has been a typical response. I respond "ANTI-AGING MEDICINE really exists and the market for doctors who open anti-aging medical spas is currently 50 billion dollars per year with each patient worth 4-20,000 dollars per year in products and services. " Recent episodes of "60 minutes, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and a Barbara Walters ABC Special on longevity" report that a certain Dr. Aubrey DeGrey is to this new frontier what David Suzuki and Al Gore are to environmentalism. The "Inconvenient Truth" is that the super wealthy are already the first customers, the investors and the owners and promoters of this entirely new form of medicine. Billions of real money are already committed to commercial products under development. What we are talking about is a medicine not just designed to rescue you from cancer, heart disease or degenerative conditions after they are diagnosed but a whole new system of medical care designed to prevent disease years or even decades before it might happen. Not everyone is convinced that even the garden variety anti-aging ideas are safe. Some recent headlines read.. "Antioxidant Vitamin E supplements may be deadly" and "Don't bank on anti-aging pills anytime soon - unless you're a worm" Some feel we have no business even poking around and tinkering with mother nature's secrets. Potential therapies have had a rough start here in the west but have taken root elsewhere. When stem cell technologies were banned in western countries, Chinese students just packed up their lap-tops and headed home to apply this new knowledge to a more receptive audience. This is how a cancer treatment called Gendicine originated. We in North America have a regulatory system that does not allow individual risk takers to move so rapidly to commercialize new medical technology. If computers and software had been regulated like medicine we would still be using Commadore 64's and playing Pong. Unwillingness to take risks drastically reduces the possibility of benefit. According to Dr. S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois a "longevity dividend" of lower health care costs, increased savings and worker productivity would result from a modest deceleration in the rate of aging by about seven years, and adequate funding could produce "dramatic advances in preventive medicine and public health within the next few decades." I am Morris Johnson . At age 52 , after spending 35 years reading scientific medical research journals I do not just follow fads . I am neither an uncritical enthusiast nor an uninformed skeptic. I personally venture out within the bounds of my personal means to use the best science the world has to offer in attempt to catch and surf the longevity wave and secure for myself a personal longevity dividend. I have designed and do follow my own personalized healthy lifespan management program. Is the science real or bogus. As I write this I have just begun a 10 week course to study this thing called the "longevity Dividend". Tomorrow I will attend a conference entitled "Improving Human Health 2 ? Metabolic Syndrome". Let me be your guide to take the mystery out of the term "Longevity Dividend" and lets explore together the promises and risks for not just baby boomers and their children but society as a whole. For example, how might longer healthier lives affect the economics of pensions, jobs and family relationships and medical care Systems. This 10 part series will bring you my findings , pose questions and perhaps add an opinion or two, if space permits. You may send your feedback "attention Pharmer Mo" at extropian.pharmer at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mfj.eav at gmail.com Fri Jun 6 15:21:58 2008 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 08:21:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Longevity Dividend Course OP-ED Assignment 02 Message-ID: <61c8738e0806060821h4af07989ha009be78a44a0b58@mail.gmail.com> 02-Healthy Demographics To accept "groundhog day" and succumb to death at the statistically predicted age of 85 or to defy statistics to keep motoring on , that is the question; whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of social persecution for daring to hope to be able to flaunt youthful beauty at 113?.or by taking up arms against aging to transform it into "steady-state self-directed long-term self-improvement project". "Holy purple shades of Hamlet's ghost Dad" respond my kids. "Are you going to make us listen to the statistics and demographics of how all you baby boomers with your funky old man diseases want to flush away your 53 trillion or so dollars of pension fund money and enslave our kids to satisfy your vain attempt to perpetuate your denial of the inevitability of your certain and timely death? " "Yes", I respond "this family conference is about the demographics of aging". WE ARE THE GENERATION OF OLD PEOPLE WHO WILL RULE THE 21ST CENTURY, according to Ken Dychtwald Ph.D. in AGE POWER. We have a responsibility to learn how to use our power wisely! Once we lived in fear of global starvation from uncontrollable population growth. Now China, Europe, Eastern Europe and Australia are all racing towards zero population growth as they reduce infant mortality, infectious disease and use planned parenthood. People only reduce family size after the threat of disease , malnutrition and racial conflict diminishes. A new challenge to a healthy lifespan, Metabolic Syndrome, has become an epidemic with over 25% of North Americans affected. "Improving Human Health-08" presenters define it as systemic insulin resistance resulting from a combination of (even modest ) obesity ("toxic waist ") , chronic silent inflammation, high triglycerides, high blood pressure, and impaired glucose tolerance. Good genes or regular physical activity can mask it but diabetes, atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease, stroke and cancer are its ultimate consequences. High risk groups include aboriginals whose genetics were never designed to cope with the rapidly digested carbohydrates of a supersized "McDiet". Metabolic syndrome develops most rapidly in people with depression, lack of self asteem, or a feeling of lack of control over personal circumstances. Young adults whose lifestyle also includes smoking, drinking, risky recreational drug combinations , a poor quality diet, and sedentary lives may be the first generation since 1850 to reverse the trend towards increased longevity. Researchers suggest the "Mediterranean food pyramid", regular exercise, low glycemic index (slowly digestible) carbohydrates and certain foods and nutritional supplements as countermeasures ( http://www.machineslikeus.com/cms/news/the-secret-long-life-may-not-be-genes). What really drives healthy longevity gains is education and disposable income in that order. Educated affluent boomers seek out solutions without regard to cost while a disproportionate number of the lower socioeconomic groups , unsure of a solution do nothing . Ironically, those with less ability to buy into the new health technologies are also destined to have to remain healthy enough to become the caregiver population for the affluent boomers. Statistics show we are living longer at the average rate of 2.5 years every decade and this longevity gain is accelerating despite the growing gap between subpopulations. The gap between Healthspan (healthy vibrant productive lifespan) and total lifespan will replace poverty as the scourge of the 21st century (http://www.alternet.org/story/84396/). We must remain healthy, active and part of society and like the "one hoss shea" only fall apart the very instant before death. Failure to do this means physically and mentally frail elderly boomers will be 35-70% of the population in 2050. This will be an absolutely intolerable "dependency ratio" for the young to bear. Suppose if you will, that problem and solution to this "historically insoluble enigma" are one and the same. Pensioners and pension fund owners have 53 trillion reasons to replace palliative medicine with regenerative medicine. A world that can spend trillions on old-fashioned wars can just as easily spend trillions in a "War against Aging". Imagine if a war on premature death could produce extended longevity. Just as the computers of 2008 would have been magic in 1908, the medicine of 2108 after the "War against Aging" has nearly a century under its belt may be nothing short of a magic show. Can we "bootstrap it" with what we know today well enough to make it to that show regenerated instead of frail. Every war has to have a "flashpoint" to start. Fortunately, a "War for Healthy Longevity" can ignite from any of 7 scientifically accepted Pandora's "tinder" boxes. In part 3 I will detail what we think we know that can be used to make our healthspan equal to our lifespan. You may send your feedback attention "Pharmer Mo" at extropian.pharmer at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mfj.eav at gmail.com Fri Jun 6 15:23:59 2008 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 08:23:59 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Longevity Dividend Course OP-ED Assignment 03 Message-ID: <61c8738e0806060823i20c2d215j2ef650ef76861817@mail.gmail.com> 03-Healthy Biology All living things have metabolism, metabolism continually causes damage , damage eventually causes pathology , pathology is disease, and leads to aging then death. Mother nature made biology so complicated so every generation would have no choice but to grow up, reproduce, nurture offspring and then get dead as fast as possible to make room for the next go round. "You know what dad, We think there's hope for you yet. Let's see you weasel out of this one". "To do justice to the topic this time, the kids are going to see dad sweat , by golly", says I. Metabolism is the incredibly complex network of molecular and cellular processes that keep us alive. Gerontologists study metabolism. Pathology is the network of molecular processes that kill us. Geriatricians study disease pathology. A whole new breed of anti-aging specialists study and treat the missing link, damage. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23358964/ documents how some simple regenerative measures are now part of integrative (combining of all possible options into a carefully planned package) medicine. You can turn an old car into a vintage classic car by assessing the condition then systematically repairing the old damage , then continue watching for new damage and fix that too. Why can't you do the same with people? That's the "engineering approach" proposed by Dr Aubrey de Grey, founder of the Methusalah Foundation., Cambridge , UK. He has raised 10 million dollars of funding in the last 2 years and awards funding for research towards creating a replicatable animal model, the Rejuvenated Robust "Methusalah" Mouse (MM). Simply put take a mouse as old as a 55 year old human (in mouse years) and give it 3 times its remaining life expectancy , all in good health.. If you use these same age retarding techniques on people you should halve the rate of damage and add 30 extra healthy years to the 30 expected for a 55 year old and raise total healthspan by 20% overall. Aubrey sees damage repair as the critical control points that reduce the metabolic hazards to an acceptable level and manage the risk of diminished quality of the finished product, lifespan.. Aubrey has segmented the damage into 7 categories: junk inside cells, junk outside cells, too few cells, too many cells, chromosome mutations, mitochondria (energy producing intracellular organelles) mutations and protein crosslinks. For each category there is a proposed repair strategy. The sum of these strategies is termed "engineered negligible senescence" (SENS)[ http://richardjschueler.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=56847 ] . Later in this series I will discuss the safety and efficacy of specific current therapies as they relate to the "seven deadly sins of metabolism". These interventions are at various stages of research, development and clinical and every day commercial application. Aubrey states that you don't have to repair all the damage at once. If you start at the "biological age" of 55 and select the most critical areas and fix HALF THE DAMAGE you should double the total healthspan and raise the remaining healthspan 5 times. The goal for a commercial regenerative medicine industry would be to reduce the remaining damage each time therapy is undertaken and implement increasingly more effective repair. Eventually repair happens faster than new damage occurs. FYI-Watch the BBC TV series " How to Build a Human 4of4 - Forever Young (60 minutes) 1/6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7ZAhdSidzk 2/6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=necHabLN37Q 3/6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cAIPTPIL7A 4/6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qqoT1oCEBI 5/6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LObrLpV8ric 6/6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkf23Nn9qX0 Aubrey has coined the term "Longevity Escape Velocity" as the rate at which rejuvenation therapies must improve in order to hope to outpace the accumulation of damage they cannot currently fully repair. Compare this to manned flight, an insoluble problem since the dawn of civilization until 1903. Once the Wright Brothers made the first proven flight, everything was copied and improved upon until today we can fly just about anything anywhere. For a sneak peek into the future see : http://transcurve.net/blog/aaron/10-reasons-you-will-live-to-1000. My next piece will detail the issues surrounding the bioethics debate about purposefully increasing healthy longevity. You may send your feedback attention "Pharmer Mo" at extropian.pharmer at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mfj.eav at gmail.com Fri Jun 6 15:25:18 2008 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 08:25:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Longevity Dividend Course OP-ED Assignment 04 Message-ID: <61c8738e0806060825ga1e0ff8habbf243ecdc43618@mail.gmail.com> 04-Healthy Ethics "Trust me we know what's good for you dad and we'll always do the (ethical) right thing". I know you mean well, but if what you deem ethical and right for me is blocked by legislation or regulation; will you let me die? The Readers" Digest thesaurus of synonyms calls moral, decent, virtuous, upright, proper, fitting, correct, just, fair, aboveboard and kosher "ethical" and underhanded, shady, improper, unfair, lowdown, nefarious, unbecoming, unseemly, indecorous, immoral and indecent "unethical. " Ethics are not fixed and can be skewed by "moral hazard", the punishment we get or cause for doing good deeds. Moral hazard occurs when there are more beneficiaries to death than life. The value of a "Quality Adjusted Life Year" (QALY)[mathematically derived value of a year of perfect health] for a patient determines if an HMO or public payor will contribute and how much towards a medical good or service. For example a simple vaccination for HPV when allowed under medicare can have a $100,000 /QALY value if it is deemed that the population based average risk of death from cervical cancer is too low. Then a "sensitivity analysis" can be done and criteria which modify the accessibility are developed so that the adjusted QALY value is reduced to an acceptable number, usually less than $50,000/QALY saved. Ethics of institutionalized Ageism is demonstrated thusly: If a youth dies it's a loss of potentially productive life ; If a frail elderly person dies it's a blessing to see them free of pain and suffering. "Living Wills" are spun to be a way for the frail or terminally ill to relieve health care providers of the need for heroic or long term end of life palliative measures. The moral hazard is that the last year of life is extraordinarily expensive. The payor saves by being able to redistribute the savings to other covered services or shareholders. In 2008 in Saskatchewan when 43.7% of every tax dollar went to healthcare, the average cost of all the health care goods and services was $4,360 per person. Saving $5-30,000 by socially accepted forms of passive euthanasia VS allowing expensive experimental, risky heroic long shot measures which may provide insights into how to better treat the next person show how ethics and moral hazard can collide as an ethical conundrum. Canada's "progressive licencing" for new pharmaceuticals is a step towards managing this hazard. ( http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg19826523.800-canada-to-rele ase-trial-drugs-to-patients.html ). Our culture does not allow "honor killing" within families or maintaining a one child policy and selecting for that child to be a son by killing newborn girl babies however, a Seattle Washington man ,Timothy Garon, who used State Law approved medical marijuana to ease his pain from advanced hepatitis was knocked him off the elegibility list for a liver transplant and left to die recently. Some say taxpayer paid universal medicare creates an incentive to act irresponsibly because the safety net will catch you. Cost shared coverage of preventative care should yield savings over the total life-cycle of a patient. http://www.fightaging.org/archives/001479.php briefly considers the economic costs Vs benefits of the longevity dividend Let me set out some of the common arguments against enhancing adult longevity as set down by George Dvorsky in his presentation to the "securing the Longevity Dividend" meeting. George states that critics contend that death has value by giving meaning to life, providing for the need for morality, allowing for self-sacrifice, preventing excessive risk aversion, making beauty exist and providing a vital imperfection. Some say that it would be cost prohibitive, people would have unequal access and that distribution would be unfair. Some say the motivations are questionable, are of no known social good, produce anti-social behavior, there are more pressing concerns for society to deal with (global security and geopolitical gamesmanship) and that individual actions are against the collective best interest (http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/anissimov20080513/ ). The wealthiest 1 percent of USA households household income averages 190 times the national average , own 34.3% of the nations wealth and include the Forbes 400 whose 2006 wealth was 1.25 Trillion dollars. This is more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent. Power and money trump ethics so how does the rest of society manage the moral hazard of undeniable access to lifespan enhancing and extending and enhancement therapeutics ( http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/cebys08/ ) for some and QALY limited access for everybody else? My next piece will provide details of life extending therapeutics which have a wide range of accessibility, cost and proof of efficacy. Some have been available for years and some are years from the commercial market. This series was meant to help you plan for the future based by developing your own personal pro-health and longevity strategic action plan. You may send your feedback attention "Pharmer Mo" at extropian.pharmer at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mfj.eav at gmail.com Fri Jun 6 15:26:54 2008 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 08:26:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Longevity Dividend Course OP-ED Assignment 05 Message-ID: <61c8738e0806060826o18563e16ha493808becd6402d@mail.gmail.com> 05-Healthy Medicine -Safe and Efficacious Remember dad you can't counsel people to take a whole bunch of meds like a doctor , pharmacist or nurse practitioner or tell them they'll live to 120 if they take x+y+Z therapies?got that! Absolutely, but I can point to specialty anti-aging and regenerative medical associations such as www.worldhealth.net , list some mainstream food, supplement and herbals, detail the connection between these and the 7 deadly sins of biology. The scientific literature describes the processes of metabolism which lead to pathology. Epigenetics modulators (gene switches) include dietary folic acid, B12 and cysteine . Orphan Therapies such as "hyperbaric hydrogen therapy " and DMSO (dimethy-sulfoxide) and cannabinoids have missed timely commercialization for unethical, non-scientific reasons. Over 300 books on longevity and aging were published in 2007 ( http://science-library.blogspot.com/2007/12/books-on-aging-longevity-published-in.html ). Some therapies against the "seven deadly sins" are very expensive and many are experimental, with the potential for long-term unforeseen negative consequences. There are some decent products out there and these will improve as more competition enters this marketplace. My personal view on this matter is that "I'm 52, my wife is deceased from MS, my kids are pretty much on their own and I have done all the things society expects of a human so what have I really got to loose but "retirement". The potential upside gain for undertaking calculated high risk health management practices is extra decades to achieve things I could never have hoped to accomplish in a normal healthspan or lifespan. I do believe I own what is left of my life for better or worse. I take great offence to any government regulator who somehow claims to own custodianship over my body or some kind of legal right to prevent entrepreneurial health management interventions telling me what I can or cannot consider safe or efficacious personal preventative and restorative health management protocols." To defeat an enemy with 7 faces, you must first understand everything that makes them tick.. http://www.veoh.com/videos/v8255881AP8Z7XH8&source=embedVideo http://blog.methuselahfoundation.org/2007/09/sens3_report_towards_mitochond_1.html 1-Cell loss, cell atrophy requires Cell therapy and perhaps dietary telomerase activators such as a milkvetch astralagus extract (OTC in the USA) and phase 2 antioxidant enzyme inducers such as ones from crucifers like broccoli. 2-Junk outside cells requires Vaccination causing internalisation 3-Protein crosslinks requires Link-breaking molecules/enzymes Examples: Rx L-guanidine and OTC carnosine and experimental Rx ALT711 for cataracts, cardiovascular and connective tissue hardening. 4-Death-resistant cells require Cell death gene therapy, vaccination with for example Gendicine P53 gene encapsulated in a cold virus for cancers. 5-Mitochondrial mutation require Nuclear versions of 13 genes and some supportative/preventative nutritional metabolism optimizers such as acetyl-l carnitine and alpha lipoic acid.and antioxidant anti-inflammatories such as caryophyllene and CBD from hemp and humulene from hops.. Mitochondria are the easiest to support through supernutrition and the results are immediate and dramatic. 6-Junk inside cells require Enzymes from soil bacteria/fungi or similar technology to digest and excret to clean house. 7-Nuclear [epi]mutations (only cancer matters) requires novel technologies such as "WILT": telomerase/ALT knockout plus periodic stem cell reseeding I am not going to deal with the leading edge countermeasures like lab grown implantable organs, stem cell based internal tissue regeneration, robotic surgery, self-service telemedicine, nanobots and devices implanted for various purposes, or the implications of computational science (Artificial General Intelligence) based stuff but be assured its coming too. To see Microsoft's vision of the future of personal health concept (office labs) see- http://www.thoughtware.tv/videos/watch/1727 June 27/28/29 in Los Angeles a pre-conference "Aging 2008" and the "Understanding Aging" UCLA conference will present updated research supporting the issue of treating aging as a curable disease. http://mfoundation.org/aging2008. . Now for some simple but effective things anybody can do. Practice Caloric Restriction (CR) ?consume 30% less calories then that recommended for your height and weight - until you are below your optimal BMI (body mass index) weight. Resveratrol from botrytis infected mouldy grapes made into juice/wine/purified extract is the new alternative way to simulate CR. GlaxoSmithKline just bought Sirtis pharmaceuticals to push this one as a crutch for those who don't want to go the CR route. Modifying the siruin gene expression is sound but it is known that those stinking fat cells still keep exuding free radicals and provide the gunk that drives 5 of the 7 deadly metabolic killers so resveratrol without CR is unwise http://www.machineslikeus.com/cms/news/living-longer-its-better-go-hungry-exercise. In addition, consume a wide variety of antioxidants and anti-inflammatory foods and supplements. Reliance on one "miracle ingredient" is the Achilles heel of modern medicine.. Different organs, and cells rely on individual nutrient combinations so diversity and balance are the way to go. Add salmon, blueberries, yogurt, fish oil, broccoli sprouts, Hemp, flax , a broad range of spices, tomatoes, purple grape juice regularly to whatever you eat now and cut back on fatty meats. and pick low glycemic index carbs http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/health/13brain.html .Your body will take what it needs and will dispose of the rest.. Very soon the genomic, proteinomic and metabolomic people will pull together your personal genome based diet but you've got to keep it together till then. To learn more about the nutritional aspects of health download the PPT'S of presentations at Agwestbio's "Improving Human Health 2: Metabolic Syndrome (pre-diabetes)" which I attended April 24/25 2008. Go to http://www.agwest.sk.ca/events/IHH08/IHH08_presentations.htm and use "ihh08" for ID and "metabolic" for password?.a little gift to ourselves courtesy of myself for sharing access and the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture and the Government of Saskatchewan for funding the conference. All these wanna-be vibrant boomers are expected to avoid boredom by going back to school and getting second and third careers, all the while collecting pensions. In the next part we will question if these expectations are going to meet with a speedbump or two. You may send your feedback attention "Pharmer Mo" at extropian.pharmer at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jonkc at bellsouth.net Fri Jun 6 15:26:58 2008 From: jonkc at bellsouth.net (John K Clark) Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 11:26:58 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings References: <20070210113413.GQ21677@leitl.org><000601c74d36$14b5a5d0$80bd1f97@archimede><20070210182045.GF21677@leitl.org><3cf171fe0702101031y61274711hde9a72a2eb2e31ba@mail.gmail.com><20070210184954.GI21677@leitl.org><3cf171fe0702101223t1a3884bdqf57c6677ae95ee1e@mail.gmail.com><005101c74da7$2168ec30$0a054e0c@MyComputer><7.0.1.0.2.20070211111725.0220a620@satx.rr.com><006801c74e0c$b600d370$59044e0c@MyComputer> <7.0.1.0.2.20070211130148.02318940@satx.rr.com><002e01c74ec3$ee5eadc0$0f0b4e0c@MyComputer><45D09A16.4020908@goertzel.org><005a01c74ef1$0bc8eab0$3c064e0c@MyComputer><000301c8c34d$4877fba0$a9e61e97@archimede><010b01c8c3f6$735e7340$0301a8c0@MyComputer> <003201c8c716$fcdd2b20$4ee51e97@archimede> Message-ID: <001e01c8c7e9$c6f12920$0301a8c0@MyComputer> "scerir" > Cold fusion seems to be a real "effect". Oh the effect is real alright, the question is can the effect best be explained by physics or by psychology and the study of human gullibility and wishful thinking. You included 2 links, the first one http://www.aip.org/pnu/2008/split/865-2.html Is interesting but I've already read it and has absolutely nothing to due with cold fusion so I don't know why you mentioned it. It's about hot stuff, very hot indeed; a beam of extremely energetic neon ions crashed into beryllium. Hot hot hot. The second link http://www.physorg.com/news131101595.html is indeed about cold fusion. It says "reporters from six major newspapers and two TV studios" were interested but unsurprisingly no reputable science journal was. It's never a good sign when TV reporters are interested in something but scientists are not. So, esteemed professor Homer J Bumblefuck joins the long list of similar nonentities that have reported cold fusion over the last nineteen years, every single one of which has fallen into a well deserved black hole of oblivion. Think I'm wrong this time? Fine, I will repeat the bet I've made so many times before: If a pro cold fusion article (not counting Muon-catalyzed cold fusion) appears in Science or Nature or Physical Review Letters before June 6 2009 I will send you $1000, is it doesn't you will sent me $100. Come on, it's generous odds and easy money! John K Clark From mfj.eav at gmail.com Fri Jun 6 15:28:27 2008 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 08:28:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Longevity Dividend Course OP-ED Assignment 06 Message-ID: <61c8738e0806060828xb51af16m3d159962e7d52dd0@mail.gmail.com> 06-Healthy Pensions "Bubble , bubble toil and trouble, cauldron boil and cauldron bubble?3 dancing witches and all that", says I. "Oh quit with the Shakespeare dad, we get the point that pensions are a chaotic witches brew of 207 Trillion USD (2006 stats) global economy of equities (54 T$) , debt, bonds (67 T$), hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds (3 T$) mutual funds, funds of funds, and derivatives (including 50 trillion of credit derivatives) just to name a few." "And yes Dad, we know coasting into the sunset on "Freedom 55" is something you want no part of; You'd rather cash in all your pensions before 65, buy a cryonics (storage of a body in liquid nitrogen) contract with a company like Alcor ( http://www.alcor.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/alcor/public/InfoRequest.cgi ) as well as buy into some means of preserving your body from just before death so that when as you hope they thaw you out your mind and body are not beyond repair, even with technologies of the future and get Re-booted so to speak." "Sure kids that's it for me but I must deal with the little matter of keeping pensions liquid and funded so that the vast majority of the other 6 billion people who might simply want to live longer and healthier can get the freedom they bought before any funeral or un-funeral interferes." All 3 kinds of pension (defined contribution , defined benefit and money purchase) funds own all sorts of equities as well as alternative investments, such as infrastructure, hedge funds and venture capital There is a closed payback Loop created when pension funds own health care industry corporate stocks. The wealth of the elderly investors claws back profits as health care consumers pay for health care services from their pensions I present the notion of reducing the hazard of pension investments by ensuring the pension funds invest ethically into technologies and services which reduce unhealthy lifespan, or increase total lifespan. Actuaries already agree that without corrective actions , off the scale longevity will crater payouts if pension funds remain invested as they are now. Some suggest that a root cause analysis would say the problem is that retirement age is too low in relation to lifespan. A healthy extremely aged workforce who continue to contribute as they earn is suggested as the answer. Those who earn too little or are unable or unwilling to work will then be a manageable unfounded liability. A key question is how soon and how intensively a "War on Aging" will be integrated into the global business economy. Billions are already at play but to sustain global scale pension payouts its going to have to ramp up to tens of trillions. Given that commercialization is hindered by risk aversion by regulators and a generally under-informed apathetic population , time is definitely of the essence to engage a process of public education. Today in Saskatchewan we are at a point of opportunity. With perhaps 10 pretty secure years to go for the "energy bubble" we have to find sufficient incentives to derail the dangerously blindered re-investment by energy only into energy. Acceleration of diversification to mate the capital of the Estevan, Weyburn, Lloydminister , Northern Saskatchewan tar sands and all the other energy hot spots with the Science , technology and incubator start-up clusters such as in the Saskatoon region might be a good place to start. To get the process going perhaps there will have to be some initial "herding , clubbing and baiting" but the smart money should catch onto ways to justify these "longevity dividend" products and services as high risk but fundamentally sound investment options. Like it or not, governments ought to feel ethically bound to aid in greasing the tunnel and loading and pointing the policy cannon. Government might mandate an alternative to an oil/energy production tax or royalty grab in the form of an involuntary private investment into an industry directed targeted "Longevity Dividend" Sovereign Wealth series of ethical funds. These funds might be mandated to pay both the investors and the public treasury dividends that would help to pay for the whole issue of self-directed preventative health planning, implementation and longevity enhancement for those not fortunate enough to be in the top 1% of the wealthy. Keeping those oldsters happy and healthy and productive might prevent a potential "age war" or as I have put it to my kids, "the day they put a bounty on old people." The next pieces on medicare reform, disability, emigration/immigration/baby-making and inter-generational transfer will round out my commentary and fill in some gaps left in the other pieces. I hope you have checked out some of the links along the way as they substantiate that this is not a fictional crack-pot literary effort but a serious thinking through of an issue I feel may be new to many of you . You may send your feedback attention "Pharmer Mo" at extropian.pharmer at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From scerir at libero.it Fri Jun 6 18:18:06 2008 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 20:18:06 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings References: <20070210113413.GQ21677@leitl.org><000601c74d36$14b5a5d0$80bd1f97@archimede><20070210182045.GF21677@leitl.org><3cf171fe0702101031y61274711hde9a72a2eb2e31ba@mail.gmail.com><20070210184954.GI21677@leitl.org><3cf171fe0702101223t1a3884bdqf57c6677ae95ee1e@mail.gmail.com><005101c74da7$2168ec30$0a054e0c@MyComputer><7.0.1.0.2.20070211111725.0220a620@satx.rr.com><006801c74e0c$b600d370$59044e0c@MyComputer> <7.0.1.0.2.20070211130148.02318940@satx.rr.com><002e01c74ec3$ee5eadc0$0f0b4e0c@MyComputer><45D09A16.4020908@goertzel.org><005a01c74ef1$0bc8eab0$3c064e0c@MyComputer><000301c8c34d$4877fba0$a9e61e97@archimede><010b01c8c3f6$735e7340$0301a8c0@MyComputer><003201c8c716$fcdd2b20$4ee51e97@archimede> <001e01c8c7e9$c6f12920$0301a8c0@MyComputer> Message-ID: <008201c8c801$ab77d960$a6e61e97@archimede> John K Clark: > You included 2 links, the first one > http://www.aip.org/pnu/2008/split/865-2.html > Is interesting but I've already read it and has absolutely nothing > to due with cold fusion so I don't know why you mentioned it. Just to show something simple and previously unknown. We do not know everything. > Think I'm wrong this time? Fine, I will repeat the bet I've > made so many times before: If a pro cold fusion article > (not counting Muon-catalyzed cold fusion) appears in > Science or Nature or Physical Review Letters before > June 6 2009 I will send you $1000, is it doesn't you will > sent me $100. Come on, it's generous odds and easy money! I hope that Nature or Science would publish "cold fusion" experiments showing a process like D + D -> T + n D + D -> He3 + p D + D -> He4 + hv D + D -> something else To my knowledge there are experiments showing, i.e., the production of He4, *but* there are technical (calorimetric) problems when they measure the excess heat/energy and the resulting radiation. So, once again, the question seems to be: 1) is excess heat/energy really measured ? 2) is excess heat/energy due to a fusion process? are there neutrons, protons, or He4? As long as they do not measure the excess heat/energy (and such a measurement is not easy) Nature or Science cannot publish "cold fusion" papers. From mfj.eav at gmail.com Fri Jun 6 19:16:50 2008 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 12:16:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Longevity Dividend Course OP-ED Assignment 07 ptA Message-ID: <61c8738e0806061216r719cc340jb1ca53fe59d19ffd@mail.gmail.com> 07- Medicare and Health Insurance Reform Ok dad, we'll leave you alone on the medicare and health insurance reform issue?. this is one of your passionate areas. "Oh my goodness gracious me, Holy swamp of quicksand and alligators, I'm liable to loose a leg, get mangled or be swallowed alive this time " says I. USA Medicare economics as detailed in http://www.kaiseredu.org/tutorials_index.asp show medicare costs 14% of the USA federal budget and covers only 43 million of 320+ million and requires 159 billion or 3,765 per person average out of pocket expenditures to get benefits. The highest cost (25,000 or more per year) cost of beneficiaries (10% of those covered) use 69% of 2006 total budget. By 2018 medicare trust fund reserves will be used up and as the taxpayer to beneficiary ratio drops from 4/1 to a projected 2.4/1 for 78.6 beneficiaries in 2030. This is predicted to drive the very fundamentals of financing healthcare from critical to flat-lining. In Saskatchewan Health care consumes 95% of every tax dollar collected for 2008. Education at 2 billion (22.7% of the 8.57 Billion dollar provincial budget) more had better live up to its potential to enable the citizens to lower their short and long term health care costs to the treasury. University Students and Alumni all have access through the PAWS portal to a very good database of professional, technical and scientific scholarly journals to empower decision making. I would be absolutely helpless to reliably compare hearsay with state of the art science without being able to read the research. If I had one suggestion to enhance the potential of achieving a "Saskatchewan longevity dividend" to reduce the accelerating cost from 6 billion to a flat-line or even reduced cost it would be to provide University of Saskatchewan PAWS portal full-text scientific journal access to every person with a Sask Health card. Medicare must leverage knowledge, e-education and telemedicine in order to free up resources of people, equipment , procedures and materials to enhance wellness. Without this a universal longevity dividend will remain publicly unfundable , unsustainable and unavailable except for that 1% superwealthy who can defy the world in order to take care of number one. Self-directed preventative care in consultation with health care professionals is where I propose health care head so that when the crunch hits in 2025 that we have handled it like a "Y2K" and fixed it before it hits. The Canadian rationing method of waiting lists and limiting numbers of procedures available is unethical where a globally distributed pool of resources exceeds the number of paying customers . This drives medical tourism. According to http://www.singaporemedicine.com "5 myths of Medical Tourism) 415,000 customers accessed high quality, low (20% of north American comparable) cost, efficient, efficacious goods and services. The industry projects 4 billion revenue for 2012 excluding permanent luxury full-service medical ocean-cruise-liner type of outsourced nursing home alternatives. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mfj.eav at gmail.com Fri Jun 6 19:23:00 2008 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 12:23:00 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Longevity Dividend Course OP-ED Assignment 07 ptC Message-ID: <61c8738e0806061223t5ed2388csfc7c1c99e8c6bdb0@mail.gmail.com> In Saskatchewan economic calculations are done behind closed doors and medical criteria for drug coverage are created. I propose , for pharmaceuticals a system-wide proposal to buy drugs on an "efficacy-based pricing" model. By that I mean the value of the disease to be treated or cured would differ from patient to patient based on medical criteria. Multiplying the number of people in each criteria /group by a "progressive bid" price for the drug based on the value of the same drug for use in treating each different criteria would create an average composite per dose value for the public payor to cover. Currently if for example , a high cost anti-cancer drug is available, a medicare committee decides how many doses at the market price the province will buy and sets out to analyse the statistics to see what criteria would allow just the right number of prescriptions to use up that estimated budget for that particular drug. That is not fair, or ethical but is a worldwide accepted practice. A model where all possible customers are served is more desirable. If the cost is negotiated between drug company and medicare using the "efficacy based pricing" matix all medically necessary prescriptions can be covered. The drug company benefits as well as the maximum number of sales for high cost drugs X "efficacy value" will maximize its ability to extract gross revenue overall. All non-Sask Health Card customers pay the Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price independent of this so the market is not distorted or skewed. I have not even touched on methods to enhance future health in order to reduce future costs and increase current service availability to ensure Medicare sustainability. This will be covered in the next piece on disability. You may send your feedback attention "Pharmer Mo" at extropian.pharmer at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Jun 6 19:36:33 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:36:33 -0500 Subject: [ExI] [extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings In-Reply-To: <001e01c8c7e9$c6f12920$0301a8c0@MyComputer> References: <20070210113413.GQ21677@leitl.org> <000601c74d36$14b5a5d0$80bd1f97@archimede> <20070210182045.GF21677@leitl.org> <3cf171fe0702101031y61274711hde9a72a2eb2e31ba@mail.gmail.com> <20070210184954.GI21677@leitl.org> <3cf171fe0702101223t1a3884bdqf57c6677ae95ee1e@mail.gmail.com> <005101c74da7$2168ec30$0a054e0c@MyComputer> <7.0.1.0.2.20070211111725.0220a620@satx.rr.com> <006801c74e0c$b600d370$59044e0c@MyComputer> <7.0.1.0.2.20070211130148.02318940@satx.rr.com> <002e01c74ec3$ee5eadc0$0f0b4e0c@MyComputer> <45D09A16.4020908@goertzel.org> <005a01c74ef1$0bc8eab0$3c064e0c@MyComputer> <000301c8c34d$4877fba0$a9e61e97@archimede> <010b01c8c3f6$735e7340$0301a8c0@MyComputer> <003201c8c716$fcdd2b20$4ee51e97@archimede> <001e01c8c7e9$c6f12920$0301a8c0@MyComputer> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080606142516.023d26e8@satx.rr.com> At 10:47 AM 6/1/2008 -0400 and 11:26 AM 6/6/2008, JKC wrote: >The article (http://www.physorg.com/news131101595.html) > >mentions "esteemed Physics Professor Yoshiaki Arata of Osaka >University in Japan". I've never heard of him and know nothing >about him except that he knows how to type. >So, esteemed professor Homer J Bumblefuck joins the long >list of similar nonentities that have reported cold fusion >over the last nineteen years This is known as "the argument from local repute in Backwater, Fla." Japanese scientists and onlookers might have a different assessment, since Professor Yoshiaki Arata was reportedly awarded the national Japanese Order of Culture in 2006. "Yoshiaki Arata, Professor Emeritus, Osaka University is one of five. He is awarded for his great academic achievements in high temperature engineering and new welding science. The Order of Culture (Bunka-Kunsho) is the highest ranked award in Japan. The awarding ceremony was at the Imperial Palace, Tokyo on 3rd November, Culture Day in Japan." So he's not a truck driver, he's a bunco-gumshoe welder, haw haw haw. With a lifetime annuity from the Japanese government. I still have no dog in this race. Damien Broderick From kanzure at gmail.com Fri Jun 6 20:02:46 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 15:02:46 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Longevity Dividend Course OP-ED Assignment 07 ptA In-Reply-To: <61c8738e0806061216r719cc340jb1ca53fe59d19ffd@mail.gmail.com> References: <61c8738e0806061216r719cc340jb1ca53fe59d19ffd@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200806061502.46754.kanzure@gmail.com> On Friday 06 June 2008, Morris Johnson wrote: > Ok dad, we'll leave you alone on the medicare ?and health insurance > reform issue?. ?this is one of your passionate areas. ? "Oh my > goodness gracious me, Holy swamp of quicksand and alligators, I'm > liable to loose a leg, get mangled or be swallowed alive this time " > says I. The real reform is do-it-yourself medicine. There is no reason whatsoever that you should not be allowed to heal your own wounds. http://diybio.org/ http://biohack.sf.net/ - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Jun 6 20:37:28 2008 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (hkhenson) Date: Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:37:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars In-Reply-To: References: <060520081810.11208.48482C2A000EA52700002BC82206999735010404079B9D0E@comcast.net> <200806060128.m561SXCM027764@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <1212784802_27098@s8.cableone.net> At 09:23 PM 6/5/2008, you wrote: >On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 7:22 PM, Keith Henson ><hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote: >On 6/5/08, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote: > >snip > > > > Whenever one looks at the alternative means of hauling apes, one always > > comes away with a new respect for good old gasoline. > >Indeed. > >So what do we need for carbon neutral synthetic gasoline? > >At a recent conference a guy had worked out the numbers to suck carbon >dioxide out of the air and combine it with hydrogen in a reverse >combustion industrial operation. > >That's an interesting idea, but how exactly is this done? Overall, nCO2 + 3n+1H2 --> H(CH2)nH + nH2O That's where oil came from in the first place. In detail, CO2 + H2 --> CO + H2O Condense out the water, add more hydrogen and you have syngas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas Feed the syngas to Fischer-Tropsch synthesis plant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_synthesis There is a detailed flow chart of how Sasol does it here http://sasol.investoreports.com/sasol_sf_2008/html/sasol_sf_2008_10.php?PHPSESSID=9df857efb179c75ba73ae3a11246d695 It is a relatively low temperature (350 deg C) exothermic process described here: http://sasol.investoreports.com/sasol_sf_2008/html/sasol_sf_2008_11.php They produce about 7 million metric tons of synfuels a year. That's about 0.2% of the world's oil production, but it's plenty big enough to get an accurate estimate of what such plants cost. The main cost would be the hydrogen. Ignoring the relatively low cost of electrolysis cells, it would be $0.40/kg at $0.01/kWh. Figuring gasoline as pentane, 5CO2 + 16H2 --> C5H12 + 10H2O 5x44 + 16x2 5x12+12 10x(2+16) 220 32 72 180 252 252 It takes 32 kg of H2 to make 72 kg of synfuel. Since gasoline has a density of about 3 kg/gallon, this would be about 24 gallons. It would cost (in hydrogen) 32x.40/24 or $0.53/gallon. (This ignores the huge cost of the plants, but on the other hand, they are just front ends to existing refineries and they should last for many decades.) I don't know how these plants would get C02 out of the air. They could cook it out of limestone and let the limestone combine with CO2 out of the air in a big lake. Or dump calcium oxide into the ocean and let it combine with CO2 and settle out. Or use scrubbers on regular air or feed it with anything that has reduced carbon, trash, old tires, or biomass. At first they would most likely use coal, but *much* less coal than they would use making hydrogen from coal. The first use of hydrogen from solar power satellites would probably be to at least double the output of the Canadian tar sands plants by reducing the amount of product they have to use up to make hydrogen. I don't know if this mailing list is the place to go into details of chemistry since this should be fairly obvious to anyone who took high school chemistry. On the other hand, I don't know how many of the list readers actually know chemistry. Those who do, please check my numbers. Keith From scerir at libero.it Fri Jun 6 21:20:41 2008 From: scerir at libero.it (scerir) Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 23:20:41 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings References: <20070210113413.GQ21677@leitl.org><000601c74d36$14b5a5d0$80bd1f97@archimede><20070210182045.GF21677@leitl.org><3cf171fe0702101031y61274711hde9a72a2eb2e31ba@mail.gmail.com><20070210184954.GI21677@leitl.org><3cf171fe0702101223t1a3884bdqf57c6677ae95ee1e@mail.gmail.com><005101c74da7$2168ec30$0a054e0c@MyComputer><7.0.1.0.2.20070211111725.0220a620@satx.rr.com><006801c74e0c$b600d370$59044e0c@MyComputer> <7.0.1.0.2.20070211130148.02318940@satx.rr.com><002e01c74ec3$ee5eadc0$0f0b4e0c@MyComputer><45D09A16.4020908@goertzel.org><005a01c74ef1$0bc8eab0$3c064e0c@MyComputer><000301c8c34d$4877fba0$a9e61e97@archimede><010b01c8c3f6$735e7340$0301a8c0@MyComputer><003201c8c716$fcdd2b20$4ee51e97@archimede><001e01c8c7e9$c6f12920$0301a8c0@MyComputer> <008201c8c801$ab77d960$a6e61e97@archimede> Message-ID: <083701c8c81b$2da688a0$9a094797@archimede> There is a page here, about Arata's experiments, and the 'excess heat' difficult measurement. http://physicsworld.com/blog/2008/05/coldfusion_demonstration_a_suc.html From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Jun 6 23:08:57 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:08:57 -0500 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080606175412.022fa598@satx.rr.com> I've been musing on this depraved doctrine. I'd be inclined to respond to that claim ("death gives life its meaning") thus: "You think life is *meaningless* without suffering and death? What the hell's wrong with you? Do you think having a full mouth of good teeth is meaningless without the potential for your teeth rotting and falling out? Here, let me help you appreciate life better with this steel mallet applied to your mouth. Are you really so incompetent in logic and reason that you can assert: 'Without death, life is worthless, and if life is worthless you might as well be dead'?" It's true that threats against our physical integrity, lethal and otherwise, arouse intense, gratifying states of alertness and responsiveness in an otherwise complacent, routinized and dulled person. But in those cases it's not *death* and *harm* that give us meaning; it's their successful *avoidance*. That's why people call an unusual escape from threatened death a "miracle" and "thank God" for it; nobody calls the death of all those others who failed to be saved by the "miracle" praiseworthy and miraculous in giving meaning to those doomed people's lives, and ours. Damien Broderick From spike66 at att.net Sat Jun 7 00:21:05 2008 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 17:21:05 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars In-Reply-To: <1212784802_27098@s8.cableone.net> Message-ID: <200806070048.m570lox7004515@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org > [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of hkhenson > Sent: Friday, June 06, 2008 1:37 PM > To: ExI chat list > Subject: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars > ... > ...$0.01/kWh. Figuring gasoline as pentane, > > 5CO2 + 16H2 --> C5H12 + 10H2O > 5x44 + 16x2 5x12+12 10x(2+16) > 220 32 72 180 > 252 252 > > ...On the other hand, I > don't know how many of the list readers actually know > chemistry. Those who do, please check my numbers. Keith Keith, why pentane for these calcs instead of octane? Pentane is liquid at room temp but just barely. I agree the reactions you call out above do balance. When I have some time to look at it, I want to consider the total energy balance in: 8CO2 + 25H2 --> C8H18 + 16H2O since octane is something we already have the infrastructure to handle. Not now tho, I'm preparing to do some recreational: 2C8H18 + 25O2 + $$ --> 16CO2 + 18H2O + {8^] spike From brent.allsop at comcast.net Sat Jun 7 02:39:39 2008 From: brent.allsop at comcast.net (Brent Allsop) Date: Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:39:39 -0600 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20080606175412.022fa598@satx.rr.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20080606175412.022fa598@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <4849F4EB.3010107@comcast.net> Damien, Thanks so much for posting this. I so strongly agree with this, and wish there was more I / we could do than just, as individuals, say I agree in a follow up post to this list. I'd sure like to see a topic like: "Does death give meaning to life?" and have two camps, one of which has something like your statement here so I could more explicitly show my passionate belief in this point of view. I've met many people that claim death gives meaning like this, and I'm sure we'll all meet more in the future. I think it would be so wonderful and powerful to be able to point to a camp containing something like what you say here, and say this is how we all feel about this. When lots of people say something, it has so much more power. When I say things like this alone, everyone just looks at me as if I'm crazy - especially when my English is so terrible and I can't say things as powerfully as this. And I think it would really take them back, being able to challenge them to "canonize" their very different POV. It would make them have to really think about it. I bet they would be fearful of doing any such because their POV is so blatantly and obviously stupid and faithless in comparison? And sure, some would clearely accept such a chalange and join such insane camps to compete with us. But I bet the next generation, before they also get similarly old and corrupted, if they can see such a canonized topic with both camps side by side before they locked in their ways, would clearly see what is truly insane and what really makes sense to them, for the rest of their life. But, it will do me no good to be the only one in such a camp. Will anyone agree to join me in explicitly indicating they are in such a camp at canonizer.com, if we canonize something like this as our camp statement? Damien, will you? Anyone else willing, or have any ideas of how to improve what Damien has started here? Brent Allsop Damien Broderick wrote: > I've been musing on this depraved doctrine. I'd be inclined to > respond to that claim ("death gives life its meaning") thus: > > "You think life is *meaningless* without suffering and death? What > the hell's wrong with you? Do you think having a full mouth of good > teeth is meaningless without the potential for your teeth rotting and > falling out? Here, let me help you appreciate life better with this > steel mallet applied to your mouth. Are you really so incompetent in > logic and reason that you can assert: 'Without death, life is > worthless, and if life is worthless you might as well be dead'?" > > It's true that threats against our physical integrity, lethal and > otherwise, arouse intense, gratifying states of alertness and > responsiveness in an otherwise complacent, routinized and dulled > person. But in those cases it's not *death* and *harm* that give us > meaning; it's their successful *avoidance*. That's why people call an > unusual escape from threatened death a "miracle" and "thank God" for > it; nobody calls the death of all those others who failed to be saved > by the "miracle" praiseworthy and miraculous in giving meaning to > those doomed people's lives, and ours. > > Damien Broderick > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > From thespike at satx.rr.com Sat Jun 7 03:11:35 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 06 Jun 2008 22:11:35 -0500 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <4849F4EB.3010107@comcast.net> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20080606175412.022fa598@satx.rr.com> <4849F4EB.3010107@comcast.net> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080606221039.0246e5c8@satx.rr.com> At 08:39 PM 6/6/2008 -0600, Brent wrote: >But, it will do me no good to be the only one in such a camp. Will >anyone agree to join me in explicitly indicating they are in such a camp >at canonizer.com, if we canonize something like this as our camp >statement? Damien, will you? No. But-- >Anyone else willing, or have any ideas of >how to improve what Damien has started here? By all means appropriate my comments, with or without attribution. Damien Broderick From sparkle_robot at yahoo.com Sat Jun 7 05:15:15 2008 From: sparkle_robot at yahoo.com (Anne Corwin) Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 22:15:15 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <4849F4EB.3010107@comcast.net> Message-ID: <789248.33007.qm@web56507.mail.re3.yahoo.com> The "join our camp!" thing is the sort of mentality that generally causes me to run away screaming from groups of people, regardless of whether or not I happen to agree with some of the things they're saying or not. Call it a personal quirk if you will, but IMO, treating the "um, no, death isn't cool and in fact actually sucks" viewpoint as anything other than totally obvious is silly and unnecessary. Nobody who is not experiencing horrible unrelenting physical or mental pain wants death -- there's no need for the establishment of "camps" to convince them of this. IMO, it's much more telling to look at how people behave over the long term than at what they say. Do they sit there wishing their beloved grandparents dead? Of course not -- and in fact, they'd probably help pay for Grandpa's heart surgery if he needed the assistance and they had the means to assist. Do they insist that, were they to contract cancer, they'd just let it kill them without even attempting to fight back? No, of course not (provided they aren't Christian Scientists or the like). In other words, people who are already alive generally want to stay that way, and frankly would almost certainly jump at the chance to take advantage of health and life-prolonging treatments if they were available. If any "advocacy" is to be done in response to the "death gives meaning to life" sentiment, one possibly productive route (and the one I personally favor) would be for individuals (as themselves, not necessarily as representatives of some "camp" or "club") to publicly speak and write about what they think is GOOD about life, what they enjoy doing, what about their existence strikes them as so wonderful that they honestly can't see why they'd want it to cease. - Anne From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Jun 7 05:22:43 2008 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (hkhenson) Date: Fri, 06 Jun 2008 22:22:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars In-Reply-To: <200806070048.m570lox7004515@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <1212784802_27098@s8.cableone.net> <200806070048.m570lox7004515@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <1212816314_30679@s5.cableone.net> At 05:21 PM 6/6/2008, you wrote: > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org > > [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of hkhenson > > Sent: Friday, June 06, 2008 1:37 PM > > To: ExI chat list > > Subject: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars > > >... > > ...$0.01/kWh. Figuring gasoline as pentane, > > > > 5CO2 + 16H2 --> C5H12 + 10H2O > > 5x44 + 16x2 5x12+12 10x(2+16) > > 220 32 72 180 > > 252 252 > > > > ...On the other hand, I > > don't know how many of the list readers actually know > > chemistry. Those who do, please check my numbers. Keith > >Keith, why pentane for these calcs instead of octane? Pentane is liquid at >room temp but just barely. Real gasoline is a witch's brew of stuff. All the chemicals listed here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating plus a bunch. Could have used most any hydrocarbon. In the wintertime gasoline for the northern states can be as much as 40% butane. >I agree the reactions you call out above do >balance. > >When I have some time to look at it, I want to consider the total energy >balance in: > > 8CO2 + 25H2 --> C8H18 + 16H2O > >since octane is something we already have the infrastructure to handle. Not >now tho, I'm preparing to do some recreational: > >2C8H18 + 25O2 + $$ --> 16CO2 + 18H2O + {8^] Take plenty of money when go. keith From pgptag at gmail.com Sat Jun 7 08:23:35 2008 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Sat, 7 Jun 2008 10:23:35 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Reminder: MAX MORE in Second Life tomorrow Message-ID: <470a3c520806070123xb47371bra1042538eb4ca38a@mail.gmail.com> http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/max_more_is_back_talk_on_unsolved_problems_in_transhumanism_in_second_life/ Unsolved Problems in Transhumanism 10:00am 12:00 PST - 12:00 2:00pm CST - 1:00pm 3:00pm EST - 6:00pm 8:00pm UK - 7:00pm 9:00pm Continental Europe Sunday June 8, 2008, SL-Transhumanists @ Extropia Core SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Extropia%20Core/160/58/22/?img=http%3A//translook.com/images/9/97/Extropiacore3s.jpg&title=SL-Transhumanists%20@%20Extropia%20Core&msg=Welcome%20to%20SL-Transhumanists%20@%20Extropia%20Core Max' talk promises to be a key milestone, not only for transhumanism in VR worlds, but for transhumanism in general. We want to see much More of Max, and I hope this will be only the first of many appearances of Max in SL and other VR worlds, webcasts etc. I and other SL-Transhumanists are honored to have contributed to the organization of this event, and you don't want to miss it. Join us tomorrow, email or IM me in SL if you need help - I will be using my new SL avatar Eschatoon Magic, search for him and IM in Second Life. See you tomorrow! G. From robotact at gmail.com Sat Jun 7 13:21:19 2008 From: robotact at gmail.com (Vladimir Nesov) Date: Sat, 7 Jun 2008 17:21:19 +0400 Subject: [ExI] [Ethics] Consequential, deontological, virtue-based, preference-based..., ... In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 8:11 PM, Jef Allbright wrote: > On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 7:09 AM, Vladimir Nesov wrote: >> >> Does the main reason you need to include subjectivity in your system >> come from the requirement to distinguish between different motives for >> the same action based on agent's states of mind? I don't think it's >> needed to be done at all (as I'll describe below). Or do you simply >> mean that the outcome depends on the relation of agent to its >> environment (not "good", but "good for a particular agent in >> particular environment")? > > It appears we have something of a disconnect here in our use of the > term "subjective", perhaps reflecting a larger difference in our > epistemology. First, I'll mention that the term "subjective" often > evokes a knee-jerk reaction from those who highly value rationality, > science and objective measures of truth and tend to righteously > associate any use of the term "subjective" with vague, soft, mystical, > whishy-washy, feel-good, post-modernist, deconstructionalist, > non-realist, relativist, etc. thinking. For the record (for the nth > time) I deplore such modes, and strive for as much precision and > accuracy as practical (but not more so.) When I refer to something as > "subjective" I'm referring to the necessarily subjective model through > which any agent perceives its umwelt within (I must assume) a coherent > and consistent reality. But in many contexts, at least in theoretical discourse, it can be assumed that the reality is specified down to the quarks, which makes the difference between subjective look at the facts that follow from such a description and, as you see it, overzealoous objective view, to be too close to each other to warrant any distinction. Am I misundestanding your point again? Even if you insist on "subjective probabilities", there are things which are too certain for their potential falsity to influence decision-making, including epistemology. >> >> Reductionism isn't supposed to answer such questions, it only suggests >> that the answer is to be sought for in the causal structure of >> reality. If you choose to take guidance from your own state of mind, >> that's one way (but not reliable and impossible to perfect). > > Statements such as the above are jarring to me (but overwhelmingly > common on this discussion list.) Who is the "you" who exists apart > such that "you" can take guidance from your own state of mind? > You are not singular, you consist of moving parts that interact with each other. > > Yes, I speak repeatedly about the increasing good of increasing > coherence over increasing context of a model for decision-making > evolving with interaction with reality. Note that this model is > necessarily entirely subjective -- the map is never the territory. Map is in the territory, so territory that implements map can also be mapped. That is how map influences the territory, by being part of it. A fallacy is in assuming that map is the territory that is being mapped by it, even if it's not so. But it might be so, sometimes. > You may have some difficulty with my statement above, and I'm happy to > entertain any thoughtful objections, but you may have even more > difficulty with what I will say next: > > The term "increasing context" applies equally well to the accumulating > experience of a single person or to the accumulating experience of a > group -- with scope of agency corresponding to the scope of the model. > In other words, agency entails a self, but in no sense is that agency > necessarily constrained within the bounds of a single organism. No, I actually have no problem with it. My current working hypothesis for Friendliness is to construct something that is to human civilization, like a brain is to inborn lower-level drives. > So, one might object: "So Jef, you are saying that Hitler's campaign > to exterminate the Jews should be seen as moral within the subjective > model that supported such action?" To which I would reply "Yes, but > only to the extent such model was seen (necessarily from within) to > increase in coherence AS IT INCREASED IN CONTEXT." Eliminating any > who object certainly increases coherence, but it does NOT increase in > context, and thus it tends not to be evolutionarily successful. Cults > are another fine example of increasing coherence with DECREASING > context and most certainly not the other way around. I'm sure nobody is assuming objective morality. Morality is determined by properties of an agent, but properties of an agent are determined by its physical makeup, which you can analyze from outside. How does your higher cognition know what is good for "you"? Parts of the brain implementing it observe the inborn drives, or environmental infuence. >> I didn't imply a guarantee, I deliberately said they only need to be >> good in "general enough" sense. Do you have a particular model of what >> constitutes intelligent behavior? > > Yes and no. As I see it, the essential difficulty is that the > "intelligence" of any action is dependent on context, and (within the > domain of questions we would consider to be of moral interest) we can > never know the full context within which we act. Hence, ability to generalize as an essential feature of intelligence, if not the only one. > I think it is worthwhile to observe that "intelligent" behavior is > seen as maximizing intended consequences (while minimizing the > unintended (and unforeseen)). It is the capacity for effective > complex prediction within a complex environment. > > I think this problem is inherently open-ended and to the extent that > future states are under-specified, decision-making must depend > increasingly not on expected utility but on a model representing > best-known hierarchical principles of effective action (i.e. > instrumental scientific knowledge) promoting a present model of > (subjective, evolving) values into the future. > > As I said to Max several days ago (Max?) morality does not inhere in > the agent (who will at any time exactly express its nature) but in the > outwardly pointing arrow pointing in the direction of the space of > actions implementing principles effective over increasing scope > promoting an increasing context of increasingly coherent values. You keep repeating these words, and I'm sure you have some intuitive picture in your mind that is described by them, but it help in communicating that picture. > You appear to assume the possibility of some Archimedian point outside > the system (where if you could but stand (given a sufficient lever) > you could move the world.) My point, is that we are always only > within the system itself, and thus we can never have a truly objective > basis for navigating into the future. We are always outside the environment, interacting with it, or half-of-you is always outside the other-half-of-you. I don't see a problem is assuming an outside view, it is a useful approximation for reasoning. >> I don't like the notion of values very much, it looks like unnatural >> way of describing things to me. > > Yes, "values" are seen as soft, squishy mushy things, the very > antithesis of hard objective rationality. > > My usage of "values" is not entirely synonymous with "preferences" > however. I'm using "values" in the broader sense implying the actual > hard physical nature of the agent, inherently deeper than the > "preferences" which the agent might be aware of and express. In the > same sense, I encompass the "values" of a simple thermostat, > fundamentally no different than the "values" of a person, although > differing a great deal in scale of complexity. > Values = physical makeup of an agent? At this granularity, I'd say that environment is also very important in determining the values, at which point explanation looses meaning, if no specific concept is presented. -- Vladimir Nesov robotact at gmail.com From mfj.eav at gmail.com Sat Jun 7 13:39:37 2008 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Sat, 7 Jun 2008 06:39:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Longevity Dividend OPED comments? Message-ID: <61c8738e0806070639o30ccd33xd7006befdad3e2a8@mail.gmail.com> The series 1-10 are at part 7 this coming week. A small local paper carried them . Have not been able to get an urban paper to bite yet. As well I am attending Provincial Council of the political party that governed Saskatchewan last term and want to get some commentary from all and sundry about the content and what parts need more work. Morris Johnson 701-240-9411 306-447-4944 Box 33 Beaubier Saskatchewan, Canada, S0C-0H0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jonkc at bellsouth.net Sat Jun 7 17:18:45 2008 From: jonkc at bellsouth.net (John K Clark) Date: Sat, 7 Jun 2008 13:18:45 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings References: <20070210113413.GQ21677@leitl.org><000601c74d36$14b5a5d0$80bd1f97@archimede><20070210182045.GF21677@leitl.org><3cf171fe0702101031y61274711hde9a72a2eb2e31ba@mail.gmail.com><20070210184954.GI21677@leitl.org><3cf171fe0702101223t1a3884bdqf57c6677ae95ee1e@mail.gmail.com><005101c74da7$2168ec30$0a054e0c@MyComputer><7.0.1.0.2.20070211111725.0220a620@satx.rr.com><006801c74e0c$b600d370$59044e0c@MyComputer><7.0.1.0.2.20070211130148.02318940@satx.rr.com><002e01c74ec3$ee5eadc0$0f0b4e0c@MyComputer><45D09A16.4020908@goertzel.org><005a01c74ef1$0bc8eab0$3c064e0c@MyComputer><000301c8c34d$4877fba0$a9e61e97@archimede><010b01c8c3f6$735e7340$0301a8c0@MyComputer><003201c8c716$fcdd2b20$4ee51e97@archimede><001e01c8c7e9$c6f12920$0301a8c0@MyComputer> <7.0.1.0.2.20080606142516.023d26e8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <001301c8c8c2$b51ebbc0$0301a8c0@MyComputer> "Damien Broderick" > I still have no dog in this race. But why? You think cold fusion is real and esteemed Professor Bumblefuck must be a great guy because he gets a lifetime handout from the Japanese government; so why not place a bet on a dog? I'll tell you why, because we both know this "breakthrough" will lead precisely nowhere and one year from now we will be in exactly the same situation. Nothing has happened in the last decade, nothing will happen in the next. John K Clark From thespike at satx.rr.com Sat Jun 7 19:01:01 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2008 14:01:01 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Elvis Sightings In-Reply-To: <001301c8c8c2$b51ebbc0$0301a8c0@MyComputer> References: <20070210113413.GQ21677@leitl.org> <000601c74d36$14b5a5d0$80bd1f97@archimede> <20070210182045.GF21677@leitl.org> <3cf171fe0702101031y61274711hde9a72a2eb2e31ba@mail.gmail.com> <20070210184954.GI21677@leitl.org> <3cf171fe0702101223t1a3884bdqf57c6677ae95ee1e@mail.gmail.com> <005101c74da7$2168ec30$0a054e0c@MyComputer> <7.0.1.0.2.20070211111725.0220a620@satx.rr.com> <006801c74e0c$b600d370$59044e0c@MyComputer> <7.0.1.0.2.20070211130148.02318940@satx.rr.com> <002e01c74ec3$ee5eadc0$0f0b4e0c@MyComputer> <45D09A16.4020908@goertzel.org> <005a01c74ef1$0bc8eab0$3c064e0c@MyComputer> <000301c8c34d$4877fba0$a9e61e97@archimede> <010b01c8c3f6$735e7340$0301a8c0@MyComputer> <003201c8c716$fcdd2b20$4ee51e97@archimede> <001e01c8c7e9$c6f12920$0301a8c0@MyComputer> <7.0.1.0.2.20080606142516.023d26e8@satx.rr.com> <001301c8c8c2$b51ebbc0$0301a8c0@MyComputer> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080607135736.0266cb00@satx.rr.com> At 01:18 PM 6/7/2008 -0400, JKC wrote: >"Damien Broderick": > > I still have no dog in this race. > >But why? You think cold fusion is real No I don't. Apart from anything else, I'm not qualified to make that judgment. I do think there might well be something interesting happening in some experiments. This is what I posted at the end of Jan last year: "...the record also clearly shows that in the last nearly two decades, solid credentialed scientists have indeed replicated the early results (intermittently, and after long learning curves). It's not difficult to find their names. "I, too, had assumed for years that this was all nonsense and credulous crap, until I read Beaudette's book and started tracking the history. I'm now quite sure that it's not MEGA-BULLSHIT, although it still might turn out to be mistaken." Damien Broderick From brent.allsop at comcast.net Sat Jun 7 19:29:42 2008 From: brent.allsop at comcast.net (Brent Allsop) Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2008 13:29:42 -0600 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <789248.33007.qm@web56507.mail.re3.yahoo.com> References: <789248.33007.qm@web56507.mail.re3.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <484AE1A6.5040404@comcast.net> Ann, Thanks for letting me know what you think about this. This kind of information is very helpful. Anne Corwin wrote: > If any "advocacy" is to be done in response to the "death gives > meaning to life" sentiment, one possibly productive route (and the one > I personally favor) would be for individuals (as themselves, not > necessarily as representatives of some "camp" or "club") to publicly > speak and write about what they think is GOOD about life, what they > enjoy doing, what about their existence strikes them as so wonderful > that they honestly can't see why they'd want it to cease. > > Yes, there are definitely benefits to this kind of individual "advocacy". But I believe we need so much more than just this. First off, is the bandwidth problem. I have enough time to attempt to individually discuss things with perhaps you, and a handfull of other close friends. But non of us have enough time to do this with everyone on this list. Let alone everyone in the transhumanist movement, and of course not the millions and billions of people with differing and diverse beliefs. Nobody has time to read and tally up every blog and post made by everyone in the world. But wouldn't knowing, concisely and quantitatively, what they are all saying, believing, and wanting have significant value? Especially for the still minority beliefs lost in all the noise? Next is the quality issue. If I'm only talking to a few of my friends IF they are very brilliant, and work very hard at it, they will be able to come up with some kind of mediocre quality concise statements and reasons for any particular POV to help me in my moral education. But on average, the signal to noise ratio isn't going to be near as high - as it could be compared to what thousands of people could be working on collaboratively with simple / easy always progressive improvements to concise actionable statements and moral arguments. Have you ever tried to read anything on something critically actionable like Global Warming at this kind of individual scale? A bunch of friends will claim things like temperature isn't rising, and a bunch of other friends will claim such arguments are completely mistaken. And since it is very unlikely that any of your friends are world class researchers knowledgeable about the particular small set of facts you are discussing, you end up with completely worthless and meaningless noise and group hysteria. And you don't get much better than any of this even in the scientific journals. Everyone is just expressing their individual opinions. Many people claim there is a 'consensus', but there are obviously at least some people that disagree with the consensus. Is anyone doing any kind of rational attempt to conclusively state and quantitatively measure this so called 'consensus'? Isn't the fact that there is no attempt to back up claims of consensus with some kind of rigorous surveys and measurement completely absurd for such a critical to all of our futures issue? And there are far more important moral issues we are facing, that are barreling down on us like freight trains from the future, than just global warming. The primary reason nobody is attempting to measure consensus, is because such simple measures or surveys are meaningless and inadequate. You need to also have the reputations and rankings of everyones reputations included in various quantifiable ways, all vetted and ranked in social networking / reputation ways, so you know who are the cooks, and who are the world class knowledgeable people on particular issues. You must be able to select algorithms to value and rank peoples reputations, and such, in various ways, like we are seeking to do at canonizer.com. You talk about behavior. Right now people are rotting their dying ancestors by throwing them in a hole in the ground and such. People are refusing to invest more money in finding a cure for aging, and so on. A lot of this is because so many people are blogging about things like death gives meaning to life. You claim people don't really seriously think this, even though so many are saying it. But that is precisely the problem and terrible lying statements, causing the destructive behavior, we need to get resolved. We need to force people to stop and think about all this kind of terribly mistaken stuff they are blogging. Surely there is more we can do to help everyone see there are different behaviors we could embark on that could significantly improve all of our, and especially our children's futures? Finally there is the critical issue of simply knowing, concisely and quantitatively, what everyone wants - especially as glorious diversity increases. Spending huge amounts of time to attempt to find out in concise details what a few close friends want is clearly a good start. But we need much more than just this. If what you want is in the majority, or the primitive ways things have been always done in the past, then there are no problems. You can get what you want simply by listening to all the blogosphere noise. But what we need to know, is what are the maverick leaders / experts / and visionaries... the ones in the still minority camps.. seeing? Chances are, you don't know any of these yet because we are all blinded by all the majority blogging noise saying such things as death gives meaning to life. You can't get close to getting what everyone wants, until you have some kind of concise and quantitative information about just what it is everyone does want. And I always say, the more diversity the better, and nobody can do it alone as an individual. Thanks Brent Allsop From benboc at lineone.net Sat Jun 7 21:17:01 2008 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2008 22:17:01 +0100 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <484AFACD.5040603@lineone.net> Damien Broderick said: >I've been musing on this depraved doctrine. I'd be inclined to >respond to that claim ("death gives life its meaning") thus: > >"You think life is *meaningless* without suffering and death? What >the hell's wrong with you? Damien, that's spot on! ben zaiboc PS also what Anne Corwin said. Agree with that 100% ben From benboc at lineone.net Sat Jun 7 21:19:57 2008 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2008 22:19:57 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Subject: Longevity Dividend Course OP-ED Assignment 05 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <484AFB7D.1020609@lineone.net> Morris Johnson said: > All these wanna-be vibrant boomers are expected to avoid boredom by going > back to school and getting second and third careers, all the while > collecting pensions. In the next part we will question if these > expectations are going to meet with a speedbump or two. Ha ha. If i didn't have such a good sense of humour, i'd be insulted. One thing to say about this: What the hell? Never mind "'wannabe", I AM a 'vibrant boomer' myself (I'm sure i'm not the only one either), and boredom is /never/ a problem for me. There is one thing, and one thing only, holding me back - the degenerative effects of ageing. My eyes aren't what they used to be, i get tired a bit sooner than i used to, and can't quite hack staying up until 3 a.m. as easily as i used to (though i still try! lol). Bring on those anti-agathics! Going back to school? Well, i never left, really. Learning new stuff has always been a part of my life, and i expect that 's the case for most ppl here. As for collecting a pension, i hope i never have to, and that's never been part of my plan. i want to be a serial careerist. The hell with golf! I simply don't understand the people who say "woudn't you get bored if you lived more than 100 yrs?" I consider myself a mere baby in the 2nd half of my 1st century.. ben zaboc From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sun Jun 8 10:50:54 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 12:50:54 +0200 Subject: [ExI] longevity dividend course OP-ED assignment 01 In-Reply-To: <61c8738e0806060819o663fe396xe335aedf2b417fb7@mail.gmail.com> References: <61c8738e0806060819o663fe396xe335aedf2b417fb7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <580930c20806080350q2fc0e925tabfdda7d6ee43ea1@mail.gmail.com> On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 5:19 PM, Morris Johnson wrote: > We in North America > have a regulatory system that does not allow individual risk takers to move > so rapidly to commercialize new medical technology. If computers and > software had been regulated like medicine we would still be using Commadore > 64's and playing Pong. Unwillingness to take risks drastically reduces the > possibility of benefit. The situation in Europe is worse, if anything. In fact, there is an ideological bias against experiments on humans not so different from the middle-age interdiction against the dissection of corpses. Stefano Vaj From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sun Jun 8 11:24:32 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 13:24:32 +0200 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20080606175412.022fa598@satx.rr.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20080606175412.022fa598@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <580930c20806080424u2811f1bat50c351b0556cadc1@mail.gmail.com> On Sat, Jun 7, 2008 at 1:08 AM, Damien Broderick wrote: > I've been musing on this depraved doctrine. Personally, I have a different angle on all that, namely that *lifespan is totally irrelevant to whatever truth may be contained in such doctrine*, unless of course it should be construed that suicide at one's earliest opportunist would be a moral duty. Accordingly, those who believe that death gives meaning to life should at the very least be indifferent, rather than hostile as they are, to life extension; and might even have other reasons to promote it without being inconsistent with such view. In fact, the truth is that they do not really cherish death - in fact, most of them are adamantly opposed, say, to euthanasia - but rather the surrendering to a supposed providential design that exactly deprives life *and* death itself of whatever greatness it might have. Stefano Vaj From pgptag at gmail.com Sun Jun 8 13:56:35 2008 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 15:56:35 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Reminder: MAX MORE in Second Life today Message-ID: <470a3c520806080656lb8f5facq2a85a309f9da29c6@mail.gmail.com> Max will speak in 3 hours. Don't miss this talk, follow instructions in the message quote below if you wish to attend. G. On Sat, Jun 7, 2008 at 10:23 AM, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote: > http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/max_more_is_back_talk_on_unsolved_problems_in_transhumanism_in_second_life/ > > Unsolved Problems in Transhumanism > 10:00am 12:00 PST - 12:00 2:00pm CST - 1:00pm 3:00pm EST - 6:00pm > 8:00pm UK - 7:00pm 9:00pm Continental Europe > Sunday June 8, 2008, SL-Transhumanists @ Extropia Core > > SLURL: > http://slurl.com/secondlife/Extropia%20Core/160/58/22/?img=http%3A//translook.com/images/9/97/Extropiacore3s.jpg&title=SL-Transhumanists%20@%20Extropia%20Core&msg=Welcome%20to%20SL-Transhumanists%20@%20Extropia%20Core > > Max' talk promises to be a key milestone, not only for transhumanism > in VR worlds, but for transhumanism in general. We want to see much > More of Max, and I hope this will be only the first of many > appearances of Max in SL and other VR worlds, webcasts etc. I and > other SL-Transhumanists are honored to have contributed to the > organization of this event, and you don't want to miss it. Join us > tomorrow, email or IM me in SL if you need help - I will be using my > new SL avatar Eschatoon Magic, search for him and IM in Second Life. > > See you tomorrow! > G. > From natasha at natasha.cc Sun Jun 8 14:46:32 2008 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 09:46:32 -0500 Subject: [ExI] EVENT: Max More in Second Life Today ! Message-ID: <004901c8c976$72226600$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> Check it out - http://www.transhumanist.biz Natasha Vita-More BFA, MS, MPhil/PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Faculty of Technology, School of Computers, Communication and Electronics University of Plymouth, UK Arts and Design - NBIC+ Convergence H+ Europe -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From natasha at natasha.cc Sun Jun 8 15:07:16 2008 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 10:07:16 -0500 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20080606175412.022fa598@satx.rr.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20080606175412.022fa598@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <006c01c8c979$57137d60$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Damien Broderick > "You think life is *meaningless* without suffering and death? What > the hell's wrong with you? Do you think having a full mouth of good > teeth is meaningless without the potential for your teeth rotting and > falling out? Here, let me help you appreciate life better with this > steel mallet applied to your mouth. Are you really so incompetent in > logic and reason that you can assert: 'Without death, life is > worthless, and if life is worthless you might as well be dead'?" > > It's true that threats against our physical integrity, lethal and > otherwise, arouse intense, gratifying states of alertness and > responsiveness in an otherwise complacent, routinized and dulled > person. But in those cases it's not *death* and *harm* that give us > meaning; it's their successful *avoidance*. That's why people call an > unusual escape from threatened death a "miracle" and "thank God" for > it; nobody calls the death of all those others who failed to be saved > by the "miracle" praiseworthy and miraculous in giving meaning to > those doomed people's lives, and ours. That is first two paragraphs of would be an exceptional serious fiction book. Natasha From mfj.eav at gmail.com Sun Jun 8 15:43:17 2008 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 08:43:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] 08-healthy disability-Longevity Dividend OPED Message-ID: <61c8738e0806080843y6c71b3cfvbc49d84257b76beb@mail.gmail.com> 08-Disability and Health "Health Canada and the FDA argue that aging is not a disease but a natural, unstoppable, inevitable process ; I would argue the middle ground, that aging is a progressive disability worthy of more than palliation". "Oh dad you are one sick puppy?everybody before 1900 who ever claimed there was a cure for aging has one thing in common, they are dead. Putting humpty dumpty together won't cure aging" Well kids, for over a decade I have been mentored by members of The *World Transhumanist Association* , an international nonprofit membership organization which advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities ( http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/index/ ) . They support the development of and access to new technologies that enable everyone to enjoy *better minds, better bodies* and *better lives*. In other words, they want people to be *better than well. From what I have learned I think there is good reason to be optimistic about the future. http://www.wfs.org/MArch-April08/WF2008_preliminary.pdf* Every technology designed to make life indistinguishable from normal for the disabled can now be adapted to enhance the abilities of the able bodied. For example scientists pushing themselves harder to be smarter are now major consumers of ritalan a drug popularized for hyperactive kids. Raymond Kurzweil ( http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=1 )views the body as a complex software program coded as DNA.. It's the millions of feedback loops from all the subroutines that make us what we are as much as the source code. http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2006/07/07/heinbaugh.blind.reader.affl , http://www.knfbreader.com/ document the dividend digital technology is now able to provide to disabled persons. Savants show what magic a mind can accomplish. The true potential of a human mind is breaking new ground. ( http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/conditions/05/07/miraculous.memory/index.html ). Breaking the communications barrier for autistic brains will bring happiness and purpose to imprisoned personalities. USA Lawmakers may 07, 2008 introduced legislation designed to speed the development of new, safer therapies for brain and nervous system disorders and injuries, which affect an estimated 100 million Americans and costs an estimated $1.3 trillion annually to treat. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=legislation-introduced-to According to http://www.Chronicdiseaseimpact.comforward planning to eliminate future disability can have a significant payback. The difference in 2050 USA GDP for eliminating disability at all ages is projected to be 5.668 Trillion (17.6% of 2050 GDP) Disabled persons at this stage of technology might resemble movie cyborgs because the mechanical/electronic devices are clunky; but they do work. Raymond Kurzweil's "universal language translator" software and ( http://www.physorg.com/news130152277.html ) a baseball cap wired to allow EEG to control household electronics devices ( http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2008/matsuoka) , for physically disabled individuals, for home care for the elderly, medical monitoring, and exercise training are disjoint technologies that are breaking new ground. Oscar Pisorius ( http://womensbioethics.blogspot.com/2008/05/bionic-athletes-stepping-out-of-debate.html ) made able bodied athletes feel disadvantaged, like he did before his new legs. (http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/cascio20080504/ ). Biomarkers may soon predict disabling diseases like alzheimers before even the sufferer is aware of it. http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20783/?nlid=1079&a=f One may think of disability as a critical catastrophic fault supported by long creeping degenerative processes. http://www.gsexperience.com/gseblog.html and http://www.gsexperience.com/archive/index.html describe a potential mechanism for systemic diseases (spalting) which may develop in humans who survive well beyond what we consider old and pose monumental new health challenges. Feb 21, 1963 John F. Kennedy said "It is not enough for a great nation to have added new years to life. Our objective must also be to add new life to those years". To put myself at risk of being partisan , we need to repeat the pledge to "put a man on the moon before the end of the decade" in the form of a new pledge " to end physical and mental disability for the average global citizen before 2025". Governments around the world must put pro-life ahead of pro-death and lead by consorting with technologists and futurists and not by the permission of uninformed pollsters. The old adage "garbage in , garbage out" is no laughing matter. Harrison Ford at the end of Indiana Jones saga says "A prize greater than a city of Gold is knowledge" As we prevent disability we enhance the wisdom of old age to become a true asset. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/health/research/20brai.html?_r=1&oref=slogin . You may send your feedback attention "Pharmer Mo" at extropian.pharmer at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu Sun Jun 8 18:28:52 2008 From: phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu (Damien Sullivan) Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 11:28:52 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars In-Reply-To: <1212784802_27098@s8.cableone.net> References: <060520081810.11208.48482C2A000EA52700002BC82206999735010404079B9D0E@comcast.net> <200806060128.m561SXCM027764@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <1212784802_27098@s8.cableone.net> Message-ID: <20080608182852.GA22526@ofb.net> > >So what do we need for carbon neutral synthetic gasoline? I've seen it suggested that synthetic methanol would make more sense than synthesizing liquid hydrocarbons. Not as energy dense but close; supposedly burns better in IC engines, at least with a bit of tweaking; and it's liquid right away, while with hydrocarbons you have to go several stages past the single-carbon point, and each stage loses energy efficiency. -xx- Damien X-) From amara at amara.com Sun Jun 8 20:01:11 2008 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 14:01:11 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Audio transcript? MAX MORE in Second Life Message-ID: I scheduled the Sunday time, I installed a new version of SL, I practiced some so I wouldn't fall off too many staircases and run into too many chairs, but after 1.5 hours of trying to get a proper audio to run through my laptop, I couldn't get it to work during Max's talk. So I heard nothing but a camera shutter and a background hiss. And I was so looking forward to his talk. Will there be an audio transcript available for this presentation? Amara P.S. At the end, I cleared the cache a few more times, crashed SL a few more times, reset the line in/line out to be 44,100 Hz a few more times, and there is some hope.. at least I heard _different_ sounds when I jumped into Extropia Core after Max's talk. I suspect that one reason for my audio difficulties was that I was running a multitude of sound programs in my preparation and during my SwRI wavelets seminar a few days ago, and it could be that some key parameters in the sound hardware of my laptop were set automatically by those other programs. But I have to go to some SL practice places that have audio and find out for sure. -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado From neptune at superlink.net Sun Jun 8 20:18:07 2008 From: neptune at superlink.net (Technotranscendence) Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 16:18:07 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Protein folding game Message-ID: http://game.bakerlab.org/portal/adobe_main Don't recall anyone mentioning this before. Sorry if it's a duplicate post. Regards, Dan Final days for my site: http://mars.superlink.net/~neptune/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jonkc at bellsouth.net Sun Jun 8 22:30:43 2008 From: jonkc at bellsouth.net (John K Clark) Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 18:30:43 -0400 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" References: <7.0.1.0.2.20080606175412.022fa598@satx.rr.com><4849F4EB.3010107@comcast.net> <7.0.1.0.2.20080606221039.0246e5c8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <004c01c8c9b7$59b6a7c0$0301a8c0@MyComputer> If true then death must be the ONLY thing that gives life meaning, the one and only thing we should concern ourselves with is death, everything else is trivial. And that's about as depressing a philosophy as I can imagine! The reason I say that is if death only provided 99.99% of meaning then although minute by minute my immortal life is only .01% as meaningful as your mortal one, .01% of infinity is still infinity. But something can be meaningful only when it exists, and 99.99% of threescore years and ten is finite. So it must be 100%, nothing else can be important. Of course whoever invented the silly phrase "death gives meaning to life" wasn't expecting anybody to think about it mathematically, he was not expecting anybody to think about it at all, it's just one of those things mortals tell each other to make them feel better. John K Clark From hkhenson at rogers.com Sun Jun 8 21:22:23 2008 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (hkhenson) Date: Sun, 08 Jun 2008 14:22:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars In-Reply-To: <20080608182852.GA22526@ofb.net> References: <060520081810.11208.48482C2A000EA52700002BC82206999735010404079B9D0E@comcast.net> <200806060128.m561SXCM027764@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <1212784802_27098@s8.cableone.net> <20080608182852.GA22526@ofb.net> Message-ID: <1212960297_830@s8.cableone.net> At 11:28 AM 6/8/2008, you wrote: > > >So what do we need for carbon neutral synthetic gasoline? > >I've seen it suggested that synthetic methanol would make more sense >than synthesizing liquid hydrocarbons. Not as energy dense but close; >supposedly burns better in IC engines, at least with a bit of tweaking; >and it's liquid right away, while with hydrocarbons you have to go >several stages past the single-carbon point, and each stage loses energy >efficiency. > >-xx- Damien X-) That's not exactly true. It's worth reading about both. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_synthesis For the space solar power argument it doesn't matter. Both need a source of carbon and energy expensive hydrogen. Keith From amcmr2003 at yahoo.com.br Mon Jun 9 04:26:22 2008 From: amcmr2003 at yahoo.com.br (Antonio Marcos) Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 21:26:22 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <004c01c8c9b7$59b6a7c0$0301a8c0@MyComputer> Message-ID: <510757.85213.qm@web50303.mail.re2.yahoo.com> >If true then death must be the ONLY thing that gives life meaning, > the one and only thing we should concern ourselves with is death, >everything else is trivial. The logic is correct for the first part, thats why I gave the example of children in my previous email, which doesnt seem to have reached the list, ill send it again if this arrives first.. but the second part is not quite, because it can be reflective. Life can be the "only" (I would say not the only as in the first part)  thing that gives meaning to DEATH.. so you have to concentrate on BOTH, so as to BOTH to have meaning.. one cant "live" -  pun intended (or "die" =D) - without the other. >it's just one of those things mortals tell each other to make them feel  better. exactly, its a trance: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/39 [] Mark. --- Em dom, 8/6/08, John K Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net> escreveu: De: John K Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net> Assunto: Re: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" Para: "ExI chat list" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> Data: Domingo, 8 de Junho de 2008, 19:30 If true then death must be the ONLY thing that gives life meaning, the one and only thing we should concern ourselves with is death, everything else is trivial. And that's about as depressing a philosophy as I can imagine! The reason I say that is if death only provided 99.99% of meaning then although minute by minute my immortal life is only .01% as meaningful as your mortal one, .01% of infinity is still infinity. But something can be meaningful only when it exists, and 99.99% of threescore years and ten is finite. So it must be 100%, nothing else can be important. Of course whoever invented the silly phrase "death gives meaning to life" wasn't expecting anybody to think about it mathematically, he was not expecting anybody to think about it at all, it's just one of those things mortals tell each other to make them feel better. John K Clark _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat Abra sua conta no Yahoo! Mail, o ?nico sem limite de espa?o para armazenamento! http://br.mail.yahoo.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kanzure at gmail.com Mon Jun 9 05:04:13 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 00:04:13 -0500 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <510757.85213.qm@web50303.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <510757.85213.qm@web50303.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <200806090004.13695.kanzure@gmail.com> On Sunday 08 June 2008, Antonio Marcos wrote: > one cant "live" -  pun intended (or "die" =D) - without the > other. To be fully alive is to be fully aware. To be fully aware is to be full of fear. To fear is to die. - saying of the warrior poets http://heybryan.org/quotes.html - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From pgptag at gmail.com Mon Jun 9 06:25:22 2008 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 08:25:22 +0200 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday Message-ID: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> See my report with comments, pictures and a videoclip. I hope someone has recorded the audio. http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/max_more_in_second_life_on_unsolved_problems_in_transhumanism/ From pgptag at gmail.com Mon Jun 9 06:34:38 2008 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 08:34:38 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Audio transcript? MAX MORE in Second Life In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <470a3c520806082334q5dda1482v2ef16360b9bd5476@mail.gmail.com> Hi Amara, it was really a great and unexpected pleasure seeing you in Second Life yesterday. Too bad you could not get the audio working. Perhaps the problem is whet you mention, or perhaps (more likely imo) it had to do with some parameter settings in the SL interface itself. I hope someone has recorded tha sudio and will make it available. My report with a few pictures and a 3 min videoclip with sound is at: http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/max_more_in_second_life_on_unsolved_problems_in_transhumanism/ After Max' talk, we will organize many other events in Second Life and other VR worlds. In 2008 we had Natasha twice, Anders, Dave Pearce and Lincoln Cannon. The master plan is organizing events every one or two weeks, but there do not seem to be enough volunteers for that. I hope to see you at the next events. G. On Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 10:01 PM, Amara Graps wrote: > I scheduled the Sunday time, I installed a new version of SL, I > practiced some so I wouldn't fall off too many staircases and run > into too many chairs, but after 1.5 hours of trying to get a proper > audio to run through my laptop, I couldn't get it to work during > Max's talk. So I heard nothing but a camera shutter and a background > hiss. And I was so looking forward to his talk. > > Will there be an audio transcript available for this presentation? > > Amara > > P.S. At the end, I cleared the cache a few more times, crashed SL a few > more times, reset the line in/line out to be 44,100 Hz a few more times, > and there is some hope.. at least I heard _different_ sounds when I > jumped into Extropia Core after Max's talk. I suspect that one reason > for my audio difficulties was that I was running a multitude of sound > programs in my preparation and during my SwRI wavelets seminar a few days > ago, and it could be that some key parameters in the sound hardware of > my laptop were set automatically by those other programs. But I have > to go to some SL practice places that have audio and find out for sure. > -- > > Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com > Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado From femmechakra at yahoo.ca Mon Jun 9 07:15:53 2008 From: femmechakra at yahoo.ca (Anna Taylor) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 00:15:53 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] 08-healthy disability-Longevity Dividend OPED In-Reply-To: <61c8738e0806080843y6c71b3cfvbc49d84257b76beb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <745171.13273.qm@web30407.mail.mud.yahoo.com> --- On Sun, 6/8/08, Morris Johnson mentioned: >"Health Canada and the FDA argue that ageing is not > a disease but a natural, unstoppable, inevitable process I agree. At this time it is a natural, unstoppable, inevitable process. There are some things you could read and apply that may prolong your longevity but in the end, at this time, the facts are the facts. Morris Johnson I would argue the middle ground, that ageing is a progressive disability >worthy of more than palliation". I don't think that makes for a very good argument. Ageing is not a progressive disability unless you believe it. People get old once they start to believe they are old. The difference lies within the biological body decaying as opposed to the mental belief of the thought. Someone that is 40 may feel as old as someone that feels 65. Where lies the distinction? >For example scientists pushing themselves harder to be smarter are now >major consumers of Ritalin a drug popularized for hyperactive kids. That's what we've come to? Believing that some drug makes you smarter? Doesn't anybody read anymore? Just because you pop a Ritalin, it won't make you smarter, "education" makes you smarter. What is education?..Well maybe that should be a different topic. Anna __________________________________________________________________ Be smarter than spam. See how smart SpamGuard is at giving junk email the boot with the All-new Yahoo! Mail. Click on Options in Mail and switch to New Mail today or register for free at http://mail.yahoo.ca From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Jun 9 08:32:32 2008 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 18:32:32 +1000 Subject: [ExI] 08-healthy disability-Longevity Dividend OPED In-Reply-To: <61c8738e0806080843y6c71b3cfvbc49d84257b76beb@mail.gmail.com> References: <61c8738e0806080843y6c71b3cfvbc49d84257b76beb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: 2008/6/9 Morris Johnson : > Every technology designed to make life indistinguishable from normal for > the disabled can now be adapted to enhance the abilities of the able > bodied. For example scientists pushing themselves harder to be smarter are > now major consumers of ritalan a drug popularized for hyperactive kids. Please note that this isn't new. Students, workers and soldiers have been using amphetamines to assist physical and mental labour for decades, and South American natives have been chewing coca leaves for the same reason for centuries. Ritalin (methylphenidate) is not fundamentally different in its pharmacology from the amphetamines or cocaine that get people locked up, despite what drug company marketing would have you believe. -- Stathis Papaioannou From amcmr2003 at yahoo.com.br Mon Jun 9 10:32:37 2008 From: amcmr2003 at yahoo.com.br (Antonio Marcos) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 03:32:37 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <200806090004.13695.kanzure@gmail.com> Message-ID: <990398.72101.qm@web50310.mail.re2.yahoo.com> >Anyone else willing, or have any ideas of >how to improve what Damien has started here? There is a simple argument to this which is the following:  Most children dont care or are even aware of death, and still most of them have more meaning in life than most "older children". So I would say "death gives A meaning to life", but by no means THE meaning to life, as implied by the statement in the subject. You can have lots of those =] > >But in those cases it's not *death* and *harm* that give us > meaning; it's their successful *avoidance*. There is an incoherence here I suppose.. How can you avoid something that does not exist? This is an argument in FAVOR of the statement, not against, IMO. Regards, Mark. Abra sua conta no Yahoo! Mail, o ?nico sem limite de espa?o para armazenamento! http://br.mail.yahoo.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kanzure at gmail.com Mon Jun 9 13:28:52 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 08:28:52 -0500 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200806090828.52230.kanzure@gmail.com> On Monday 09 June 2008, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote: > See my report with comments, pictures and a videoclip. I hope someone > has recorded the audio. > > http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/max_more_in_second_life_on_unso >lved_problems_in_transhumanism/ I agree with Amara here. We need the transcript. - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From kanzure at gmail.com Mon Jun 9 13:30:33 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 08:30:33 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Audio transcript? MAX MORE in Second Life In-Reply-To: <470a3c520806082334q5dda1482v2ef16360b9bd5476@mail.gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082334q5dda1482v2ef16360b9bd5476@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200806090830.33488.kanzure@gmail.com> On Monday 09 June 2008, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote: > After Max' talk, we will organize many other events in Second Life > and other VR worlds. In 2008 we had Natasha twice, Anders, Dave > Pearce and Lincoln Cannon. The master plan is organizing events every > one or two weeks, but there do not seem to be enough volunteers for > that. I hope to see you at the next events. I don't see why we have to use SL when the technology doesn't seem to work, we can't get transcripts, and so on. The facts aren't adding up. - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From natasha at natasha.cc Mon Jun 9 13:58:51 2008 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 08:58:51 -0500 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <005701c8ca38$f3194cc0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> Max said two things which I think need to be developed because they are edgy, provoking and will get some attention: 1. That he does not support the notion of the Singularity as being a single "event", but a series of bursts. This would be a marvelous talk in SL. Title could be "Max More speaks out against the Singularity" or something like "Singularity? Not." 2. I have never heard Max say in front of more than a couple of colleagues/friends that James Hughes and WTA intentionally misfed information to the public by crediting Huxley with defining/creating "transhumanism" and that Max never read Huxley's writing on this or ever heard of it before writing a philosophical outlook of transhumanism. While many of you/us would think this is stale and opening a can of worms, it might be a breakthrough in bringing people together and making a stand against political manipulations that did hurt H+ and continues to hurt H+ because while it has been talked about and talked about, Max has never openly talked about it and it is about him personally. Natasha Vita-More BFA, MS, MPhil/PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Faculty of Technology, School of Computers, Communication and Electronics University of Plymouth, UK Arts and Design - NBIC+ Convergence H+ Europe -----Original Message----- From: owner-sl4 at sl4.org [mailto:owner-sl4 at sl4.org] On Behalf Of Giu1i0 Pri5c0 Sent: Monday, June 09, 2008 1:25 AM To: ExI chat list; World Transhumanist Association Discussion List; extrobritannia at yahoogroups.com; sl4 at sl4.org; sl-transhumanists at googlegroups.com; Hplus2 at yahoogroups.com; transumanisti at yahoogroups.com Subject: MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday See my report with comments, pictures and a videoclip. I hope someone has recorded the audio. http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/max_more_in_second_life_on_unsolved_pr oblems_in_transhumanism/ -- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.524 / Virus Database: 270.0.0/1489 - Release Date: 6/7/2008 11:17 AM From max at maxmore.com Mon Jun 9 14:23:38 2008 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2008 09:23:38 -0500 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <200806090828.52230.kanzure@gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <200806090828.52230.kanzure@gmail.com> Message-ID: <20080609142341.CSJC18258.hrndva-omta06.mail.rr.com@D840DTB1.maxmore.com> If, as it seems is the case, no one managed to record all the audio, I will tidy up my notes for the talk and make them available along with the basic slides I used. The audio would be handy though, since I added points and illustrations as I spoke that weren't in my notes. My thanks to the 50 of you who virtually attended--I was pleasantly surprised at the number. You were the fanciest-looking audience I've had! To those of you who haven't yet dipped a toe in Second Life: I did so only recently but was able to get up to speed quickly. It doesn't require investing a whole lot of time and, while tremendous fun, is not so dangerously addicting as the combative gaming worlds reportedly are. Following that talk--my very first in a virtual world--I'm looking forward to doing another quite soon. The next will be a skeptical take on the Singularity. I was going to do that as a blog entry, as I mentioned during the talk, but it would be much better suited to a talk. Onward! Max At 08:28 AM 6/9/2008, you wrote: >On Monday 09 June 2008, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote: > > See my report with comments, pictures and a videoclip. I hope someone > > has recorded the audio. > > > > http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/max_more_in_second_life_on_unso > >lved_problems_in_transhumanism/ > >I agree with Amara here. We need the transcript. > >- Bryan >________________________________________ >http://heybryan.org/ >_______________________________________________ From amara at amara.com Mon Jun 9 14:45:32 2008 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 08:45:32 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Technology- When it works (A story) Message-ID: A story. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Technology- When it works. I think that Sunday, June 8 was destined to be an extra good day because when I woke up, there was an email in my inbox from a 72 year old woman in Latvia who told me that my smile in my pictures at my web site looked just like my grandmother's smile. Since my grandmother died before I met her, this woman was drawing on memories 60 years ago, when she had met my grandmother, grandfather, and father in a Displaced Persons camp in Esslingen, Germany, immediately after WWII; her mother and my grandmother sang Latvian folk songs in the DP camp together. Would such a contact have been possible before the Internet? Not easily. Today, humans have the fragments of a network of a global consciousness, and when it works, it works in surprisingly rich ways to enhance human lives. When it works. You see for the technology to function as advertised requires a godly amount of effort. Today I gave myself my 88th and last hormone injection to support the ten week old fetus growing inside of me. For this injection, I didn't need any more the bulls-eye circles that I had drawn on my rear-end starting in April because my bruises were guideposts enough to know where to poke the long needle to inject the progesterone. But after today, my base level hormones are enough for the fetus to continue growing its placenta to protect and nourish it for the rest of my pregnancy. So far, we succeeded, my extraterrestrial and I. Without the extra medication, it is sure from the early IVF efforts that the fetus would not have survived, and I would have miscarried, so I am grateful that today's technology gave me this opportunity to start my family. Twenty years ago I would have been imprisoned by my chronological age, forever remembering my terminated teenage pregnancies, and the choices I made in the following years to educate myself, get experience, build myself in all of the ways that I wanted to be, in order to support well a family. Women have a bit of a conundrum, in this respect. All of their eggs are formed before birth and their most fertile years are when they first enter puberty while the age and number of their eggs are already on a decline. Since thirteen year olds rarely have advanced their education and experience to a PhD level, they lack the life skills to support well (for the next 20 years) a family. So those women that want a family do their best, making tradeoffs for how much time to spend on their careers and how much time to spend on their personal lives, hoping that there will be a convergence of education, experience, and partnership before her time to reproduce is finished. By age 35, her probability to become pregnant starts to steeply decline, so if she is not established well in her career, her family choices steeply decline, as well. I had thought I made all of the right decisions. I stopped my marriage at age 36 because my spouse didn't ever want a family, I learned from my work-related repetitive strain injury a few years before, that I need more control over my work environment, and I knew that I could much better support a family and have a longer career future if I took my education to the next PhD level. So after reducing some of my crippling debt, off to Germany I went, following the best advisor I could have found and given a free education by the German government. Three years later at age 40, I had a PhD and a clear financial story and I could put the attention I needed to start a family. There was convergence too, because I had found a partner, only it was a minor inconvenience that he was located in Italy, but I could get a job there too, right? Right, but one unable to support me. However, my partner who told me not to worry about that because he would help me, moved me to his country, put a deposit on the flat that we would share and I arrived with high hopes for my newly enriched personal life and long scientific research life, expecting that I would not need to make another international move. The universe thought that I needed to learn more lessons however. Because when I arrived for my new life in my new country, my partner had 'no time to see me', and with no visa and no job for anywhere else, in a profession that was not supported by the country to which I had moved, I was in a bit of a sticky situation. I tried to make the situation function by working nights and weekends at other jobs, while watching my bank savings lessen month by month. I became extremely resourceful too, doing alot, on a little, and managing to not lose too much of my career. But this left no time for my personal life and when my savings ran dry, my desperation went into overdrive. After two years of concerted job search, refining better each time what was the most appropriate job and place for me after that experience, I'm in a recovery and healing phase, in a country to which I didn't want to move, but one that _does_ provide everything that I need to jumpstart myself to the next level, both scientifically and personally. When life gives you lemons, make limoncello. What I lost forever in my previous life was my last chance to reproduce, but technology did offer a possible solution, if I was willing to put in a godly effort, which I was. Since there was a 1% chance of pregnancy success using my own eggs due to my age, I decided the next best thing I could do is pay homage to my ethnic roots with a Baltic baby. Today I am essentially a womb-without-a view to an extraterrestrial (a little joke after my Estonian doctor kept referring to the embryo transfer as "ET"), whom I'm calling Myrtle, for now. That Myrtle exists seems like a miracle to me. What does not seem like a miracle, however, was the discovery that in-vitro fertilization, IVF, has not advanced in its techniques and methods in more than ten years. How is it possible, that for half of the human race, their life choices are still restricted by their reproductive lifetimes? How is it possible that with all of today's technology advancements, women must go through very long, physically painful and psychologically distressing experiences in order to modify their most basic biological function? How could the medical community have dropped such a large ball? And where were the transhumanists during all of this time? Isn't it exactly this type of situation that transhumanists claim that they support? If a woman today wishes to have IVF, she must carefully guide and prepare herself at each stage of her monthly cycle with hormones, first to suppress the follicles and egg production, then to stimulate them (if she is using her own) for surgical extraction, then to bleed off the uterus lining and build it back up for maximum thickness to be ready for embryo implantation. Which, today, after all of her previous efforts, has only a 10-20% chance of success. Hormone preparation requires daily injections (because the hormones don't stay in the body more than 24 hours), either into the fat tissue (first phases) or injections into the muscle tissue (second phases), and it's unavoidable to exit those phases without bruises. If one doesn't care for the injections, one can try suppositories, which usually leave rashes and sometimes, infections, so the alternative is not comfortable either. Most women, who go through IVF, are unsuccessful at pregnancy the first time. If implantation is successful, then the woman might rejoice that her daily bruising injections can stop, but she would be wrong. Because she skipped a step in her normal reproductive cycle of the egg dropping into the uterus and shedding material that releases progesterone and other nutrients that fetus needs for its placenta, the woman must supply it externally. So more injections (or suppositories) for another two months. Is she willing to do that? Of course she is, because it is for the baby to survive. However, would any young woman who is considering IVF, egg donation, or egg freezing be willing to go through such a procedure, if she knew? That is less likely. I did not succeed to convince the young scientific women that I know that they would be performing an important insurance for their life if they followed such a procedure as egg freezing. It's too difficult, for even _these_ smart, young women. For me, however, the technology offered a solution, and so far, my godly effort paid off. I found my good Estonian fertility clinic during a visit to my relatives while I was still living in Italy and facing draconic Italian laws that forbade me Italian assisted reproductive technology. I thought the clinic was superb and perfect for my plans for motherhood, wherever I lived after Italy, but I admit that an 8 hour time difference away was challenging. But the pieces started falling into place when I arrived in Boulder. I found a fertility clinic near my town that could support the efforts of the Estonian doctor, to write me the necessary prescriptions (which more-or-less followed the local clinic's own protocols). Setting up the communication between the two clinics required finding the local key support staff and patience through the bounced messages. I taught myself how to give myself my daily injections using You Tube videos and asking many questions to both fertility clinics' nurses. I followed both clinics' instructions precisely. But even precise instruction-following can have some blips. About the time of my 47th birthday, ten days before I was scheduled to fly to Riga / Tallinn and then to the Tartu, Estonia clinic for the embryo(s) transfer, I was riding my bicycle on the sidewalks like a teenager and misjudged the distance down the curb to the parking lot pavement and the front wheel abruptly made the transition. So abruptly, and since momentum _is_ conserved, that the back wheel made a glorious arc over the front wheel, and I flew in a similar trajectory over the handlebars. And landed on my head/helmet. The helmet was the smart part (I _always_ wear one when I ride), otherwise I wouldn't be writing this message now. No broken bones, no backbone out of alignment, amazingly. But I gained a cervical strain that needed a couple of months to heal completely and made it difficult to turn my neck in order to give myself my hormone injections. But it certainly had an inoculating effect on me, and how I must be careful, and it happened _before_ I became pregnant, which wasn't the situation for the stupidity gene that was expressed by my first egg donor. My donor, at about the same time, was discovered to have became accidently pregnant. She therefore eliminated herself from the clinic's donor plan, and gave me the opportunity to upgrade to another donor, who was in preparation for somebody else. That miraculous solution, since I was hormone-ly 'prepared' for the embryo transfer and the new donor was hormone-ly prepared at the same time to donate, still gave me a 50% probability of pregnancy success, but I didn't have any more the option of embryo cryopreservation (It's called a partial donor). The rest of the plan proceeded on schedule. I flew from Denver to Riga and then to Tallinn, passing through four countries' airport securities with just one carry-on bag that included 13 syringes (2 inch long needles) and several vials of hormones, giving myself my injections in hotel rooms and disposing the needles into my substitute for a medical disposal container, which was a honey jar. My 24 hour travel was the route Denver - Toronto - Frankfurt - Riga - Tallinn, then a 2 hour bus from Tallinn to the Tartu fertility clinic, where I stayed for two days and had the embryo transfer procedure. The ET itself was a simple outpatient procedure, but I stayed for longer in the clinic because I needed a quiet, restful place to sleep. Then a visit to my relatives in Tallinn, and back to Denver via a similar route and to wait. Did implantation occur? Two embryos were transferred, so, if yes, how many had implanted? I passed through each step, slowly, anxiously, trying to distract myself with the American Astronomical Society's Dynamical Astronomy Division meeting, which my institute, SwRI was hosting, and answered reviews on a paper that I had submitted with tons of errors, and wrote and submitted another NASA grant proposal along with my normal New Horizons work. After almost two weeks from embryo transfer, the first pregnancy test revealed that I was pregnant. Since my Estonian doctor had completed his role with the ET, the primary care role shifted to my Colorado fertility clinic, where they picked up the responsibility for my full care. Three weeks after the positive pregnancy test, the Colorado clinic performed the first postET ultrasound, where I learned that I was carrying one, not two, with a strong heartbeat and they considered my pregnancy to be strong and viable. Then they handed my full care to a normal ob/gyn, where I experienced more exams and I'm on my path to motherhood. What remains are two prenatal tests to learn if the fetus has any defects. If yes, then I will terminate the pregnancy, probably while crying my eyes out, and start my godly effort all over again. If no defects, which I don't expect, because my donors are young and healthy and I'm older and very healthy, my pregnancy will proceed to around New Year's. At which time, I will have the life in my hands that I created through a fair amount of my and other people's godly efforts with technology that does exist, today. Amara Graps (8 June 2008) -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado From mbb386 at main.nc.us Mon Jun 9 15:05:11 2008 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 11:05:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [ExI] Technology- When it works (A story) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1230.12.77.168.183.1213023911.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> > A story. > Thanks for this, Amara. Fascinating reading. Sorta disgusting how easily one can get pregnant when young and unmarried and unable to support even oneself... only to be sharply constrained in the later efforts when one is in a position to have a family. Wishing you and "Myrtle" all the best, always! :) Regards, MB From m1n3r2 at hotmail.com Mon Jun 9 15:56:24 2008 From: m1n3r2 at hotmail.com (M1N3R) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 17:56:24 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Technology- When it works (A story) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: From: "Amara Graps" Sent: Monday, June 09, 2008 4:45 PM > A story. > > -------------------------------------------------------------------- Wow. Amazing. Some say only women have the strength to persevere in the most grave situations. I'm ever more convinced by the day... And I do envy the newcomer for having such a loving mother :). It seems you have what most people refer to as 'luck' in ample supply :) Still I wish you two luck and all the best! However, I have one little comment on this... > Today, > humans have the fragments of a network of a global consciousness Internet. Collective consciousness is sort of an obsession to me (has been for some time). If the matter has been discussed, please let me know. Anyway, the internet seems to me a pseudo-collective of human (and artificial) minds, today an indefinite set of information but expanding very rapidly (and indefinitely). The internet is pretty non-deterministic, it has no definite size, no definite shape etc. Somewhat like our so-called mind (talking about individual mind here). So, the internet, as it is, ever more closely integrated with us, through our phones, PDAs, laptops and, at some point in the future hopefully, through our implants, might well lead to the formation of a super-consciousness including all that is human. Consider Asimov: Foundation and Earth (Gaia, Galaxia, where individuality never ceased to exist but on a grand scale hatred, violence, etc were eliminated, not mentioning the surplus to cognitive power and data storage). Thomas From pgptag at gmail.com Mon Jun 9 16:11:42 2008 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 18:11:42 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [wta-talk] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <200806090828.52230.kanzure@gmail.com> <20080609142341.CSJC18258.hrndva-omta06.mail.rr.com@D840DTB1.maxmore.com> Message-ID: <470a3c520806090911n614a0c94r536db0ef2ce6f049@mail.gmail.com> Thanks Danila! I have downloaded the file, removed the first few minutes before Max started and uploaded to another website - right click to download: http://metaxlr8.com:81/maxmoresl080608audio.mp3 Max, thanks for the great talk yesterday and I look forward to your (non) Singularity talk. G. On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 5:37 PM, Danila Medvedev wrote: > I have recorded the first 90 minutes of the talk. > Enjoy: http://files.mail.ru/52F8EC > Afterwards I had to leave due to some technical problems. > > BTW, to everyone in the future. It's very easy to record audio with a > program like ARWizard. Just set Recording source to Stereo Mix (or What > You Hear) in Volume Control (recording settings). > > P.S. Max, you needed more engaging slides. > > http://www.slideshare.net/danila/slideshows > > Yours, > Danila > >> If, as it seems is the case, no one managed to record all the audio, >> I will tidy up my notes for the talk and make them available along >> with the basic slides I used. The audio would be handy though, since >> I added points and illustrations as I spoke that weren't in my notes. >> >> My thanks to the 50 of you who virtually attended--I was pleasantly >> surprised at the number. You were the fanciest-looking audience I've had! >> >> To those of you who haven't yet dipped a toe in Second Life: I did so >> only recently but was able to get up to speed quickly. It doesn't >> require investing a whole lot of time and, while tremendous fun, is >> not so dangerously addicting as the combative gaming worlds reportedly >> are. >> >> Following that talk--my very first in a virtual world--I'm looking >> forward to doing another quite soon. The next will be a skeptical >> take on the Singularity. I was going to do that as a blog entry, as I >> mentioned during the talk, but it would be much better suited to a talk. >> >> Onward! >> >> Max >> >> >> At 08:28 AM 6/9/2008, you wrote: >>> On Monday 09 June 2008, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote: >>> > See my report with comments, pictures and a videoclip. I hope someone >>> > has recorded the audio. >>> > >>> > http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/max_more_in_second_life_on_unso >>> >lved_problems_in_transhumanism/ >>> >>> I agree with Amara here. We need the transcript. >>> >>> - Bryan >>> ________________________________________ >>> http://heybryan.org/ >>> _______________________________________________ >> >> _______________________________________________ >> wta-talk mailing list >> wta-talk at transhumanism.org >> http://www.transhumanism.org/mailman/listinfo/wta-talk >> > > > > -- > ? ?????????, > ?????? ???????? mailto:danila.medvedev at mail.ru > > ????????????? - ????? ?? ????? ???? ??? ???? ??????? > http://www.transhumanism-russia.ru/ > _______________________________________________ > wta-talk mailing list > wta-talk at transhumanism.org > http://www.transhumanism.org/mailman/listinfo/wta-talk > From natasha at natasha.cc Mon Jun 9 16:12:49 2008 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 11:12:49 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Technology- When it works (A story) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <000301c8ca4b$a9e7d540$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> Amara wrote: >At which > time, I will have the life in my hands that I created through a fair > amount of my and other people's godly efforts with technology that does > exist, today. Rock on! Wishing you the best, Natasha From dagonweb at gmail.com Mon Jun 9 17:09:27 2008 From: dagonweb at gmail.com (Dagon Gmail) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 19:09:27 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Audio transcript? MAX MORE in Second Life In-Reply-To: <200806090830.33488.kanzure@gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082334q5dda1482v2ef16360b9bd5476@mail.gmail.com> <200806090830.33488.kanzure@gmail.com> Message-ID: I have a voice transcript ready. I don't know about you people but it looked great for me, and on two screens. I moved around like a butterfly with my new PC, and got someone to send me the voice recording afterwards. I'll make sure it's online ASAP. On 6/9/08, Bryan Bishop wrote: > On Monday 09 June 2008, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote: >> After Max' talk, we will organize many other events in Second Life >> and other VR worlds. In 2008 we had Natasha twice, Anders, Dave >> Pearce and Lincoln Cannon. The master plan is organizing events every >> one or two weeks, but there do not seem to be enough volunteers for >> that. I hope to see you at the next events. > > I don't see why we have to use SL when the technology doesn't seem to > work, we can't get transcripts, and so on. The facts aren't adding up. > > - Bryan > ________________________________________ > http://heybryan.org/ > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From sondre-list at bjellas.com Mon Jun 9 14:35:07 2008 From: sondre-list at bjellas.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Sondre_Bjell=E5s?=) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 16:35:07 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Audio transcript? MAX MORE in Second Life In-Reply-To: <200806090830.33488.kanzure@gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082334q5dda1482v2ef16360b9bd5476@mail.gmail.com> <200806090830.33488.kanzure@gmail.com> Message-ID: And I tried my best to record video and sound, but Windows Vista x64 doesn't allow me to do so... Published some photos and a short video from the conference: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sondre/sets/72157605504478737/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=698qxdeMBXk - Sondre On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 3:30 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote: > On Monday 09 June 2008, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote: > > After Max' talk, we will organize many other events in Second Life > > and other VR worlds. In 2008 we had Natasha twice, Anders, Dave > > Pearce and Lincoln Cannon. The master plan is organizing events every > > one or two weeks, but there do not seem to be enough volunteers for > > that. I hope to see you at the next events. > > I don't see why we have to use SL when the technology doesn't seem to > work, we can't get transcripts, and so on. The facts aren't adding up. > > - Bryan > ________________________________________ > http://heybryan.org/ > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kevinfreels at insightbb.com Mon Jun 9 17:36:53 2008 From: kevinfreels at insightbb.com (Kevin Freels) Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2008 12:36:53 -0500 Subject: [ExI] petaflop computing In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I just saw the news release on the roadrunner. Roadrunner sustains 1000 trillion operatoins per second. Los Alamos and IBM worked 6 years to create it. Not too shabby. :-) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From amara at amara.com Mon Jun 9 18:24:11 2008 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 12:24:11 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Technology- When it works (A story) Message-ID: MB: >Sorta disgusting how easily one can get pregnant when young and >unmarried and unable to support even oneself... only to be sharply >constrained in the later efforts when one is in a position to have a >family. Speaking as someone who became pregnant as a teenager while on birth control, and who watched my chances whither away 30 years later, I can support your statement. It's insanely easy to get pregnant as a teenager; biology has made a concerted effort for the species to reproduce at that time. Human (or transhuman) women are still a long ways away from mastering their own human reproductive cycle, especially the beginning and the ending phases. Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Mon Jun 9 20:52:09 2008 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 13:52:09 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <200806090004.13695.kanzure@gmail.com> Message-ID: <90670.74881.qm@web65407.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> --- Bryan Bishop wrote: > On Sunday 08 June 2008, Antonio Marcos wrote: > > one cant "live" -  pun intended (or "die" =D) - without the > > other. > > To be fully alive is to be fully aware. > To be fully aware is to be full of fear. > To fear is to die. > - saying of the warrior poets > http://heybryan.org/quotes.html "I have no life and death; I make the tides of breathing my life and death." - Samaurai creed, 14th century Japan Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "Fear is proof of a degenerate mind [...] Fortune favors the bold [...] Persevere and preserve yourselves for better circumstances [...] Love conquers all."- Virgil From hkhenson at rogers.com Mon Jun 9 22:21:52 2008 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (hkhenson) Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:21:52 -0700 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <005701c8ca38$f3194cc0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <005701c8ca38$f3194cc0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> Message-ID: <1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net> At 06:58 AM 6/9/2008, you wrote: >Max said two things which I think need to be developed because they are >edgy, provoking and will get some attention: > >1. That he does not support the notion of the Singularity as being a single >"event", but a series of bursts. This would be a marvelous talk in SL. >Title could be "Max More speaks out against the Singularity" or something >like "Singularity? Not." Sorry Natasha, this "distinction" isn't one at all. It makes no difference if the events making up what is called the singularity take place over hours, days or years. The end result is still the same, humans as they are known today are no longer significant in shaping the world To some extent that's already true. Unaugmented humans have not been able to design integrated circuit chips for 3 decades now. Keith From amcmr2003 at yahoo.com.br Mon Jun 9 23:07:37 2008 From: amcmr2003 at yahoo.com.br (Antonio Marcos) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 16:07:37 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <90670.74881.qm@web65407.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <813042.43200.qm@web50305.mail.re2.yahoo.com> > To be fully aware is to be full of fear. + >"Fear is proof of a degenerate mind [...] hahaha, nice combination of quotes =] Regards, Mark. --- Em seg, 9/6/08, The Avantguardian <avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com> escreveu: De: The Avantguardian <avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com> Assunto: Re: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" Para: "ExI chat list" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> Data: Segunda-feira, 9 de Junho de 2008, 17:52 --- Bryan Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com> wrote: > On Sunday 08 June 2008, Antonio Marcos wrote: > > one cant "live" -&nbsp; pun intended (or "die" =D) - without the > > other. > > To be fully alive is to be fully aware. > To be fully aware is to be full of fear. > To fear is to die. > - saying of the warrior poets > http://heybryan.org/quotes.html "I have no life and death; I make the tides of breathing my life and death." - Samaurai creed, 14th century Japan Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "Fear is proof of a degenerate mind [...] Fortune favors the bold [...] Persevere and preserve yourselves for better circumstances [...] Love conquers all."- Virgil _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat Abra sua conta no Yahoo! Mail, o ?nico sem limite de espa?o para armazenamento! http://br.mail.yahoo.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kanzure at gmail.com Tue Jun 10 00:05:59 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 19:05:59 -0500 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <005701c8ca38$f3194cc0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> <1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net> Message-ID: <200806091905.59776.kanzure@gmail.com> On Monday 09 June 2008, hkhenson wrote: > Sorry Natasha, this "distinction" isn't one at all. ?It makes no > difference if the events making up what is called the singularity > take place over hours, days or years. ?The end result is still the > same, humans as they are known today are no longer significant in > shaping the world I suspect that the point is that it's more about transhumanism being a personal issue and not so much a singularity issue, which while the singularity will happen in due time, the issue of transhumanism will always be present, and this distinction is commonly portrayed as 'transhumanism by governments' and so on, ignoring the approach that could be considered generally represented by Max. - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Tue Jun 10 00:02:14 2008 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 20:02:14 -0400 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday Message-ID: <380-2200862100214470@M2W022.mail2web.com> From: hkhenson At 06:58 AM 6/9/2008, you wrote: >Max said two things which I think need to be developed because they are >edgy, provoking and will get some attention: > >1. That he does not support the notion of the Singularity as being a single >"event", but a series of bursts. This would be a marvelous talk in SL. >Title could be "Max More speaks out against the Singularity" or something >like "Singularity? Not." "Sorry Natasha, this 'distinction' isn't one at all. It makes no difference if the events making up what is called the singularity take place over hours, days or years. Sorry keith. We simply have to disagree. Natasha _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web.com ? What can On Demand Business Solutions do for you? http://link.mail2web.com/Business/SharePoint From amara at amara.com Tue Jun 10 03:33:48 2008 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 21:33:48 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Technology- When it works (A story) Message-ID: M1N3R m1n3r2 at hotmail.com : >Wow. Amazing. Well, my life seemed normal, until I described it to someone once. ;-) >Some say only women have the strength to persevere in the most >grave situations. What are the choices, though? To shrivel up and die? I didn't see any choices but to try with the life (lives) in which I found myself. >However, I have one little comment on this... >> Today, >> humans have the fragments of a network of a global consciousness >Internet. Collective consciousness is sort of an obsession to me (has been >for some time). If the matter has been discussed, please let me know. >Anyway, the internet seems to me a pseudo-collective of human (and >artificial) minds, today an indefinite set of information but expanding very >rapidly (and indefinitely). The internet is pretty non-deterministic, it has >no definite size, no definite shape etc. Somewhat like our so-called mind >(talking about individual mind here). So, the internet, as it is, ever more >closely integrated with us, I generally agree. What fascinates me lately are the twitter streams. A number of platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, ...), offer a mechanism for people to insert a 'thought of the moment' into an edit box. Humans can be quite expressive (and exhibitionist), so many do not have difficulty to write a brief phrase that represents their mind-state. Now, watch the mind-states of your friends and colleagues flow past you, and it is a little like being washed in a group consciousness. But Salmon Rushdie knows about that.... "... the Water Genie told Haroun about the Ocean of the Streams of Story, and even though he was full of a sense of hopelessness and failure the magic of the Ocean began to have an effect on Haroun. He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and [the Water Genie] explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each colored strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in the fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories ..." Salman Rushdie, _Haroun and the Sea of Stories_, (London, 1990), pp. 71-72. -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Jun 10 03:37:10 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 20:37:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars References: <060520081810.11208.48482C2A000EA52700002BC82206999735010404079B9D0E@comcast.net><200806060128.m561SXCM027764@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <1212784802_27098@s8.cableone.net> Message-ID: <006401c8caab$8dac3230$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Keith wrote ----- Original Message ----- From: "hkhenson" To: "ExI chat list" Sent: Friday, June 06, 2008 1:37 PM Subject: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars > [someone wrote] >>That's an interesting idea, but how exactly is this done? > > Overall, nCO2 + 3n+1H2 --> H(CH2)nH + nH2O > That's where oil came from in the first place. What I read was that no one has ever succeeded in producing one drop of oil by any process that nature could have used to produce the vast amounts of "fossil fuels" we have found. Do you have some explanation of how nature would have gone about using the above equation, or whether it's true that so far no one has produced oil in a way that is thought to be how nature did it? Lee > In detail, CO2 + H2 --> CO + H2O > > Condense out the water, add more hydrogen and you have > syngas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas > > Feed the syngas to Fischer-Tropsch synthesis plant. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_synthesis > > There is a detailed flow chart of how Sasol does it here > > http://sasol.investoreports.com/sasol_sf_2008/html/sasol_sf_2008_10.php?PHPSESSID=9df857efb179c75ba73ae3a11246d695 > > It is a relatively low temperature (350 deg C) exothermic process > described here: > > http://sasol.investoreports.com/sasol_sf_2008/html/sasol_sf_2008_11.php > > They produce about 7 million metric tons of synfuels a year. That's > about 0.2% of the world's oil production, but it's plenty big enough > to get an accurate estimate of what such plants cost... From amara at amara.com Tue Jun 10 04:17:40 2008 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 22:17:40 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Audio transcript? MAX MORE in Second Life Message-ID: Giu1i0 Pri5c0 pgptag at gmail.com : >Hi Amara, it was really a great and unexpected pleasure seeing you in >Second Life yesterday. I put it on my calendar weeks ago and looked forward to the talk. >Too bad you could not get the audio working. >Perhaps the problem is whet you mention, or perhaps (more likely imo) >it had to do with some parameter settings in the SL interface itself. I went through the parameter settings (Preferences) at least 10 times during the first 1.5 hours; at one point "Calyps0 Janus" led me through it step-by-step to make sure that I was setting things correctly. I was. What I didn't do until near the end of the 1.5 hours, however, was clear the cache. By then, SL was crashing for me every other time that I went in, so it might not have cleared the cache properly. Also, during that time I visited the secondlife.com : Forums, Technical Help for Macs, and I saw that SL has a preferred frequency setting for audio. On the Mac, the Audio MIDI Setup in the Applications/Utilities folder can set that value, so when I ran that program I saw that my frequency settings were wrong for SL too. As I said before, I gave a seminar at SwRI last week on wavelets and I prepared a ton of sound files to demonstrate some wavelet features, so I'm not surprised that the settings were at something different than what SL likes. I thought it weird that it didn't change my audio experience on Max's talk after I reset those values, but maybe the cache wasn't cleared properly. Anyway, the whole experience did give me more SL practice, and some people have audio, so I can catch up on what I missed. And for other Mac users, if I had audio working, I would have recorded it using the program Audio Hijack Pro. I've recorded alot of audio streaming through many sources on my Mac, and it works great. Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Jun 10 05:51:51 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 22:51:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" References: <990398.72101.qm@web50310.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <009f01c8cabe$7b0e2260$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Antonio wrote > There is a simple argument to this which is the following: > > Most children don't care or are even aware of death, > and still most of them have more meaning in life than > most "older children". > > So I would say "death gives A meaning to life", but > by no means THE meaning to life, as implied by the > statement in the subject. You can have lots of those =] I agree, but perhaps mainly in the sense that death literally "adds meaning" to the concept of life, the way people use "life" in some sentences e.g. that "one's life should be saved". You might indeed, for example, help children understand what is often meant by "life" by giving them examples of death. I also agree with you strongly that we really cannot charge the author of this wicked phrase with claiming that death gives the only meaning to life, or even that death gives the primary meaning to life. We are obliged both (a) to take the most charitable interpretation of the phrase, or claim, that we can and also (b) to try to understand what actual thought or sentiment truly lies behind it. This (entirely misguided) claim, i.e. "death gives meaning to life", feels good and right to some people because they're confusing it with the possibility of death gives spice to life And one can see that this latter is not without sense: after all, hunger makes the taste of a good meal all the more satisfying, doesn't it? NOW of course, yes, I *do* understand that the worst (and standard) logical interpretation, namely, that death does make life meaningful is something else entirely. In this latter case, I think it's mostly sour grapes. Were an immortality tablet developed tomorrow that would take effect only if you continually took it almost every single day for five years, then we'd see who is suffering from sour grapes, and who is an actual idiot. Lee From thespike at satx.rr.com Tue Jun 10 06:20:50 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 01:20:50 -0500 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <009f01c8cabe$7b0e2260$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <990398.72101.qm@web50310.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <009f01c8cabe$7b0e2260$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080610010428.023a0fe8@satx.rr.com> At 10:51 PM 6/9/2008 -0700, Lee wrote: >I also agree with you strongly that we really cannot >charge the author of this wicked phrase with claiming >that death gives the only meaning to life, or even >that death gives the primary meaning to life. No, in my experience the way the phrase is trotted out usually means exactly that--as one can see from the ancillary claptrap. "If there were no death, people would lose interest in everything, grow terminally [!!] bored, drift into idle pleasure-seeking, stop caring about each other, lose their righteous fear of God's punishment," blah blah. It might be true, but we have no basis for asserting it, except by analogy with brainless leeches who inherit great wealth and ruin themselves; that has some force, but fails to take account of other experiences with great wealth, such as Bill Gates's, say. But it's also true that a suppressed premise generally goes along the lines of "interfering with the divine plan for humans," something which is intrinsically, deontologically naughty but also prudentially wrong since the true deep meaning of life is an afterlife that can only be attained by dying. The meaning of a pupa's existence is the butterfly imago. If that were true, and demonstrably so, my attitude would be very different (as it was when I was young and more gullible, poor pupa). But note: the status of the saved supernatural imago is then purportedly *immortal* (in the major faiths, anyway) and hence, one must suppose, ex hypothesi eternally *meaningless*. Oh woe! Wouldn't it rot your boots! Damien Broderick From fortean1 at mindspring.com Wed Jun 4 04:08:32 2008 From: fortean1 at mindspring.com (Terry Colvin) Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2008 21:08:32 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [ExI] Fw: Warren Ellis gives singularity whackjobs both barrels Message-ID: <28127327.1212552512977.JavaMail.root@mswamui-andean.atl.sa.earthlink.net> -----Forwarded Message----- > >< http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=5993 > > >----------------------------------------------------------------- > >The IEEE Spectrum "special report" on The Singularity makes for >interesting reading, but I'd like you to try something as you click >through it. When you read these essays and interviews, every time you >see the word "Singularity," I want you to replace it in your head with >the term "Flying Spaghetti Monster." > >(My personal favourite right now is "The Flying Spaghetti Monster >represents the end of the supremacy of Homo sapiens as the dominant >species on planet Earth.") > >The Singularity is the last trench of the religious impulse in the >technocratic community. The Singularity has been denigrated as "The >Rapture For Nerds," and not without cause. It's pretty much >indivisible from the religious faith in describing the desire to be >saved by something that isn't there (or even the desire to be >destroyed by something that isn't there) and throws off no evidence of >its ever intending to exist. It's a new faith for people who think >they're otherwise much too evolved to believe in the Flying Spaghetti >Monster or any other idiot back-brain cult you care to suggest. > >Vernor Vinge, the originator of the term, is a scientist and novelist, >and occupies an almost unique space. After all, the only other sf >writer I can think of who invented a religion that is also a >science-fiction fantasy is L Ron Hubbard. Terry W. Colvin Sierra Vista, Arizona From mfj.eav at gmail.com Fri Jun 6 15:31:02 2008 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 08:31:02 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Longevity Dividend Course OP-ED Assignment 07 Message-ID: <61c8738e0806060831k55371866m2f13fb4af28e9730@mail.gmail.com> 07- Medicare and Health Insurance Reform Ok dad, we'll leave you alone on the medicare and health insurance reform issue?. this is one of your passionate areas. "Oh my goodness gracious me, Holy swamp of quicksand and alligators, I'm liable to loose a leg, get mangled or be swallowed alive this time " says I. USA Medicare economics as detailed in http://www.kaiseredu.org/tutorials_index.asp show medicare costs 14% of the USA federal budget and covers only 43 million of 320+ million and requires 159 billion or 3,765 per person average out of pocket expenditures to get benefits. The highest cost (25,000 or more per year) cost of beneficiaries (10% of those covered) use 69% of 2006 total budget. By 2018 medicare trust fund reserves will be used up and as the taxpayer to beneficiary ratio drops from 4/1 to a projected 2.4/1 for 78.6 beneficiaries in 2030. This is predicted to drive the very fundamentals of financing healthcare from critical to flat-lining. In Saskatchewan Health care consumes 95% of every tax dollar collected for 2008. Education at 2 billion (22.7% of the 8.57 Billion dollar provincial budget) more had better live up to its potential to enable the citizens to lower their short and long term health care costs to the treasury. University Students and Alumni all have access through the PAWS portal to a very good database of professional, technical and scientific scholarly journals to empower decision making. I would be absolutely helpless to reliably compare hearsay with state of the art science without being able to read the research. If I had one suggestion to enhance the potential of achieving a "Saskatchewan longevity dividend" to reduce the accelerating cost from 6 billion to a flat-line or even reduced cost it would be to provide University of Saskatchewan PAWS portal full-text scientific journal access to every person with a Sask Health card. Medicare must leverage knowledge, e-education and telemedicine in order to free up resources of people, equipment , procedures and materials to enhance wellness. Without this a universal longevity dividend will remain publicly unfundable , unsustainable and unavailable except for that 1% superwealthy who can defy the world in order to take care of number one. Self-directed preventative care in consultation with health care professionals is where I propose health care head so that when the crunch hits in 2025 that we have handled it like a "Y2K" and fixed it before it hits. The Canadian rationing method of waiting lists and limiting numbers of procedures available is unethical where a globally distributed pool of resources exceeds the number of paying customers . This drives medical tourism. According to http://www.singaporemedicine.com "5 myths of Medical Tourism) 415,000 customers accessed high quality, low (20% of north American comparable) cost, efficient, efficacious goods and services. The industry projects 4 billion revenue for 2012 excluding permanent luxury full-service medical ocean-cruise-liner type of outsourced nursing home alternatives. Telemedicine delivered electronically by linking the physician live (ex; from India by point to point broadband uplink) to a telemedicine rural or urban Saskatchewan site for medical consultation interactivity service access is a way to bring increasing speed, power and efficiency to service capacity while reducing per patient costs for medicare. Internet based "surgery by wire" is soon to become commercially available. Use of this technology enabled model to maximize doctor's capability to operate, by spreading all the doctors over all the patients globally is logical . If the rich assume the risks of "beta testing" deregulated leading edge technology that may be occasionally dangerous and lethal instead of wildly efficacious this reduces the time from discovery to generic mass marketing and cheap broad availability of healthcare innovations for the middle class and poor who depend predominantly on Medicare? Micheal Moore in "Sicko" dramatizes the "6/94 moral hazard gap" of a mixed public private medical delivery system trying to deliver "fairness". "Sin Taxes" represent a prepayment of a future deductible due to high risk behavior. Conversely I propose the notion of a "capped" tax deduction/credit for documented expenditures for planned preventative health measures. Public coverage of the cost of "Individual Health management plan" creation , monitoring and implementation by appropriate individually chosen health professionals can be funded by spending a portion of the current value of the projected future risk reduction dividend. In Saskatchewan economic calculations are done behind closed doors and medical criteria for drug coverage are created. I propose , for pharmaceuticals a system-wide proposal to buy drugs on an "efficacy-based pricing" model. By that I mean the value of the disease to be treated or cured would differ from patient to patient based on medical criteria. Multiplying the number of people in each criteria /group by a "progressive bid" price for the drug based on the value of the same drug for use in treating each different criteria would create an average composite per dose value for the public payor to cover. Currently if for example , a high cost anti-cancer drug is available, a medicare committee decides how many doses at the market price the province will buy and sets out to analyse the statistics to see what criteria would allow just the right number of prescriptions to use up that estimated budget for that particular drug. That is not fair, or ethical but is a worldwide accepted practice. A model where all possible customers are served is more desirable. If the cost is negotiated between drug company and medicare using the "efficacy based pricing" matix all medically necessary prescriptions can be covered. The drug company benefits as well as the maximum number of sales for high cost drugs X "efficacy value" will maximize its ability to extract gross revenue overall. All non-Sask Health Card customers pay the Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price independent of this so the market is not distorted or skewed. I have not even touched on methods to enhance future health in order to reduce future costs and increase current service availability to ensure Medicare sustainability. This will be covered in the next piece on disability. You may send your feedback attention "Pharmer Mo" at extropian.pharmer at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mfj.eav at gmail.com Fri Jun 6 19:18:30 2008 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 12:18:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Longevity Dividend Course OP-ED Assignment 07 ptB Message-ID: <61c8738e0806061218q3aa224cfv12f076f501ee1806@mail.gmail.com> Telemedicine delivered electronically by linking the physician live (ex; from India by point to point broadband uplink) to a telemedicine rural or urban Saskatchewan site for medical consultation interactivity service access is a way to bring increasing speed, power and efficiency to service capacity while reducing per patient costs for medicare. Internet based "surgery by wire" is soon to become commercially available. Use of this technology enabled model to maximize doctor's capability to operate, by spreading all the doctors over all the patients globally is logical . If the rich assume the risks of "beta testing" deregulated leading edge technology that may be occasionally dangerous and lethal instead of wildly efficacious this reduces the time from discovery to generic mass marketing and cheap broad availability of healthcare innovations for the middle class and poor who depend predominantly on Medicare? Micheal Moore in "Sicko" dramatizes the "6/94 moral hazard gap" of a mixed public private medical delivery system trying to deliver "fairness". "Sin Taxes" represent a prepayment of a future deductible due to high risk behavior. Conversely I propose the notion of a "capped" tax deduction/credit for documented expenditures for planned preventative health measures. Public coverage of the cost of "Individual Health management plan" creation , monitoring and implementation by appropriate individually chosen health professionals can be funded by spending a portion of the current value of the projected future risk reduction dividend. In Saskatchewan economic calculations are done behind closed doors and medical criteria for drug coverage are created. I propose , for pharmaceuticals a system-wide proposal to buy drugs on an "efficacy-based pricing" model. By that I mean the value of the disease to be treated or cured would differ from patient to patient based on medical criteria. Multiplying the number of people in each criteria /group by a "progressive bid" price for the drug based on the value of the same drug for use in treating each different criteria would create an average composite per dose value for the public payor to cover. Currently if for example , a high cost anti-cancer drug is available, a medicare committee decides how many doses at the market price the province will buy and sets out to analyse the statistics to see what criteria would allow just the right number of prescriptions to use up that estimated budget for that particular drug. That is not fair, or ethical but is a worldwide accepted practice. A model where all possible customers are served is more desirable. If the cost is negotiated between drug company and medicare using the "efficacy based pricing" matix all medically necessary prescriptions can be covered. The drug company benefits as well as the maximum number of sales for high cost drugs X "efficacy value" will maximize its ability to extract gross revenue overall. All non-Sask Health Card customers pay the Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price independent of this so the market is not distorted or skewed. I have not even touched on methods to enhance future health in order to reduce future costs and increase current service availability to ensure Medicare sustainability. This will be covered in the next piece on disability. You may send your feedback attention "Pharmer Mo" at extropian.pharmer at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Tue Jun 10 14:55:25 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:55:25 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Technology- When it works (A story) References: <1230.12.77.168.183.1213023911.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> Message-ID: <00cf01c8cb0a$2b06b330$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> MB writes > Sorta disgusting how easily one can get pregnant when young > and unmarried and unable to support even oneself... only to be > sharply constrained in the later efforts when > one is in a position to have a family. Not so surprising, actually. Funny thing is, there have been *traditions* and instincts going back many thousands of years concerning when to start families and have children. But of course, all the twentieth century people were far too rational, far too intelligent, and far too creative to listen to old fuddy-duddy traditions and "animal" instincts. Instead, they opted to have their cake and eat it too: plenty of sex with no cost, thanks to the pill. Hayek spells it out plainly: while we must investigate changing our traditions when they no longer seem to be appropriate, we should do so very cautiously and above all, we should try to change only one thing at a time. But the "revolutionary" meme set born in the French Revolution just doesn't see it that way, and so the price is paid. Give parents, teachers, churches, and traditions as much extra leeway you possibly can. Their traditions did *not* arise just by chance, and are *not* just old-fashioned fuddy-duddy nonsense. They are the product of survival evolution, both cultural and genetic. When in doubt, conform. I've made a lot of mistakes in my life due to plain stubborness, and to how "illogical" I found so many customs and traditions to be when I was younger. Of course we must be individuals, and of course we must question authority. But people should learn to do so only very cautiously and tentatively. Lee From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Tue Jun 10 17:44:38 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:44:38 +0200 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <004c01c8c9b7$59b6a7c0$0301a8c0@MyComputer> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20080606175412.022fa598@satx.rr.com> <4849F4EB.3010107@comcast.net> <7.0.1.0.2.20080606221039.0246e5c8@satx.rr.com> <004c01c8c9b7$59b6a7c0$0301a8c0@MyComputer> Message-ID: <580930c20806101044x4a51995ey3497936bedb7b3ed@mail.gmail.com> On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 12:30 AM, John K Clark wrote: > If true then death must be the ONLY thing that gives life meaning, > the one and only thing we should concern ourselves with is death, > everything else is trivial. And that's about as depressing a > philosophy as I can imagine! Whatever. While one may well like arguing that death does *not* give meaning to life in one sense or another, all the related arguments are obviously overkill. In fact, why would death stop allegedly giving meaning to life if life is 40 years long rather than 20? Or 400? Or 40,000? Whatever weight the idea might carry with it, it would only have a relevance if one were faced with a literally *eternal* prospective, "eternal" as in "continued subjectivity beyond the entropic death of the universe, whatever may happen in the meantime and afterwards". While the subject may have some philosophical appeal to some of us, it has, strictly speaking, very little to do with any practical choice about longevist measures. And by far the best approach, IMHO, is to ridicule those who should like to make such a great fuss upon the relatively trivial, and time-honoured, policy of attempting to extend one's life expectancy all other things being equal. Stefano Vaj From amcmr2003 at yahoo.com.br Tue Jun 10 19:55:30 2008 From: amcmr2003 at yahoo.com.br (Antonio Marcos) Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:55:30 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <580930c20806101044x4a51995ey3497936bedb7b3ed@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <277344.68316.qm@web50301.mail.re2.yahoo.com> >In fact, why would death stop allegedly giving meaning to life if life >is 40 years long rather than 20? Or 400? Or 40,000? exactly, and since every atom will most likely collapse eventually (as you seem to also point to in your email) you can always say you're NOT immortal =] so the alleged "meaning" would still stay there (mostly :) ) [] Marcos. --- Em ter, 10/6/08, Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> escreveu: De: Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> Assunto: Re: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" Para: "ExI chat list" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> Data: Ter?a-feira, 10 de Junho de 2008, 14:44 On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 12:30 AM, John K Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net> wrote: > If true then death must be the ONLY thing that gives life meaning, > the one and only thing we should concern ourselves with is death, > everything else is trivial. And that's about as depressing a > philosophy as I can imagine! Whatever. While one may well like arguing that death does *not* give meaning to life in one sense or another, all the related arguments are obviously overkill. In fact, why would death stop allegedly giving meaning to life if life is 40 years long rather than 20? Or 400? Or 40,000? Whatever weight the idea might carry with it, it would only have a relevance if one were faced with a literally *eternal* prospective, "eternal" as in "continued subjectivity beyond the entropic death of the universe, whatever may happen in the meantime and afterwards". While the subject may have some philosophical appeal to some of us, it has, strictly speaking, very little to do with any practical choice about longevist measures. And by far the best approach, IMHO, is to ridicule those who should like to make such a great fuss upon the relatively trivial, and time-honoured, policy of attempting to extend one's life expectancy all other things being equal. Stefano Vaj _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat Abra sua conta no Yahoo! Mail, o ?nico sem limite de espa?o para armazenamento! http://br.mail.yahoo.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thomas at thomasoliver.net Tue Jun 10 23:05:56 2008 From: thomas at thomasoliver.net (Thomas) Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:05:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > From: Damien Broderick > Date: June 9, 2008 11:20:50 PM MST > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" > Reply-To: ExI chat list > > > At 10:51 PM 6/9/2008 -0700, Lee wrote: > >> I also agree with you strongly that we really cannot >> charge the author of this wicked phrase with claiming >> that death gives the only meaning to life, or even >> that death gives the primary meaning to life. > > No, in my experience the way the phrase is trotted out usually > means exactly that--as one can see from the ancillary claptrap. "If > there were no death, people would lose interest in everything, grow > terminally [!!] bored, drift into idle pleasure-seeking, stop > caring about each other, lose their righteous fear of God's > punishment," blah blah. It might be true, but we have no basis for > asserting it, except by analogy with brainless leeches who inherit > great wealth and ruin themselves; that has some force, but fails to > take account of other experiences with great wealth, such as Bill > Gates's, say. > > But it's also true that a suppressed premise generally goes along > the lines of "interfering with the divine plan for humans," > something which is intrinsically, deontologically naughty but also > prudentially wrong since the true deep meaning of life is an > afterlife that can only be attained by dying. The meaning of a > pupa's existence is the butterfly imago. If that were true, and > demonstrably so, my attitude would be very different (as it was > when I was young and more gullible, poor pupa). But note: the > status of the saved supernatural imago is then purportedly > *immortal* (in the major faiths, anyway) and hence, one must > suppose, ex hypothesi eternally *meaningless*. Oh woe! Wouldn't it > rot your boots! > > Damien Broderick Yes, metamorphosis serves as a poor analogy for death since it involves self generated change, a quality of life, not death. I think the death anti-value gets used by predators to survive. If one survives as a killer, then the meaning of life becomes linked to death. It occurs to me that replication began as a device for accommodating death where the individual's indefinite survival seemed untenable. Then, when cells began sticking together it became a device for growth and increased individual organism survival. It seems to me that an extropian organism, interested in personal survival might do well to learn to fuel itself without resorting to death (predation). Years ago ASU developed cell-like machines to photosynthesize ATP. Then one could distance oneself from the society of predators who rely on death genes and death memes (sacrifice). Humans seem to pose the biggest threat to humans and transhumans. A clean, predator free environment might permit one to forego reproduction (the need for an "after life") and focus effort on auto evolution and life extension. As I see it, the probability of death would fall. The value of life would soar and its meaning would expand as one achieved ever greater beauty and happiness. The increasingly remote possibility of death might remain providing the zero reference point for the immense value and deep meaning of life. -- Thomas Oliver -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Jun 11 04:28:21 2008 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:28:21 -0700 Subject: [ExI] tommy emmanuel Message-ID: <200806110455.m5B4t2km026499@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Please pardon my off-topic, but god is with us, he plays a guitar, and ooooh man this god can play, whooooo. I have never seen the like of this. Does this cat rage or what? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ75Ent60ik I am astounded at the things the human mind can do. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Wed Jun 11 05:29:45 2008 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (hkhenson) Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:29:45 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars In-Reply-To: <006401c8caab$8dac3230$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <060520081810.11208.48482C2A000EA52700002BC82206999735010404079B9D0E@comcast.net> <200806060128.m561SXCM027764@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <1212784802_27098@s8.cableone.net> <006401c8caab$8dac3230$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <1213162341_7679@s7.cableone.net> At 08:37 PM 6/9/2008, Lee wrote: >Keith wrote > > > > Overall, nCO2 + 3n+1H2 --> H(CH2)nH + nH2O > > That's where oil came from in the first place. > >What I read was that no one has ever succeeded in >producing one drop of oil by any process that nature >could have used to produce the vast amounts of >"fossil fuels" we have found. You are misinformed. >Do you have some explanation of how nature would >have gone about using the above equation, or whether >it's true that so far no one has produced oil in a way >that is thought to be how nature did it? You are probably aware of shale oil. We produce oil from it the same way nature did other oil deposits, heat it. If that particular deposit of natural hydrocarbons were to be buried deep in the earth where it gets hot, say under a deposit of sand capped with a layer of limestone, then it would turn into an oil deposit, a really vast oil deposit. No mystery. Keith From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Jun 11 05:50:50 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:50:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars References: <060520081810.11208.48482C2A000EA52700002BC82206999735010404079B9D0E@comcast.net> <200806060128.m561SXCM027764@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <1212784802_27098@s8.cableone.net> <006401c8caab$8dac3230$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1213162341_7679@s7.cableone.net> Message-ID: <00f101c8cb87$9901e1c0$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Keith writes >>What I read was that no one has ever succeeded in >>producing one drop of oil by any process that nature >>could have used to produce the vast amounts of >>"fossil fuels" we have found. > > You are misinformed. Judging from what you write below, you may have mistaken my meaning. >>Do you have some explanation of how nature would >>have gone about using the above equation, or whether >>it's true that so far no one has produced oil in a way >>that is thought to be how nature did it? > > You are probably aware of shale oil. We produce oil from it the same way nature did other oil deposits, heat it. But did shale oil come from "dinosaurs" :-) or from living matter? It's customary for everyone to call these "fossil fuels" isn't it? What is at stake here is the abiotic theory of oil. Hmm, now I see http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/peakoil1.html which appears to present both sides of the debate. < Dave McGowan argues for the abiotic theory, which holds that oil is generated by natural processes in the earth's magma, and he also argues pointedly that the "fossil" theory has never been proven. The following is long and detailed, but a must-read: > Lee P.S. Here is McGowan's take (Yes, Damien, I *am* biased) The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins is not controversial nor presently a matter of academic debate. The period of debate about this extensive body of knowledge has been over for approximately two decades (Simakov 1986). The modern theory is presently applied extensively throughout the former U.S.S.R. as the guiding perspective for petroleum exploration and development projects. There are presently more than 80 oil and gas fields in the Caspian district alone which were explored and developed by applying the perspective of the modern theory and which produce from the crystalline basement rock. (Krayushkin, Chebanenko et al. 1994) Similarly, such exploration in the western Siberia cratonic-rift sedimentary basin has developed 90 petroleum fields of which 80 produce either partly or entirely from the crystalline basement. The exploration and discoveries of the 11 major and 1 giant fields on the northern flank of the Dneiper-Donets basin have already been noted. There are presently deep drilling exploration projects under way in Azerbaijan, Tatarstan, and Asian Siberia directed to testing potential oil and gas reservoirs in the crystalline basement. (http://www.gasresources.net/index.htm) It appears that, unbeknownst to Westerners, there have actually been, for quite some time now, two competing theories concerning the origins of petroleum. One theory claims that oil is an organic 'fossil fuel' deposited in finite quantities near the planet's surface. The other theory claims that oil is continuously generated by natural processes in the Earth's magma. One theory is backed by a massive body of research representing fifty years of intense scientific inquiry. The other theory is an unproven relic of the eighteenth century. One theory anticipates deep oil reserves, refillable oil fields, migratory oil systems, deep sources of generation, and the spontaneous venting of gas and oil. The other theory has a difficult time explaining any such documented phenomena. So which theory have we in the West, in our infinite wisdom, chosen to embrace? Why, the fundamentally absurd 'Fossil Fuel' theory, of course -- the same theory that the 'Peak Oil' doomsday warnings are based on. I am sorry to report here, by the way, that in doing my homework, I never did come across any of that "hard science" documenting 'Peak Oil' that Mr. Strahl referred to. All the 'Peak Oil' literature that I found, on Ruppert's site and elsewhere, took for granted that petroleum is a non-renewable 'fossil fuel.' That theory is never questioned, nor is any effort made to validate it. It is simply taken to be an established scientific fact, which it quite obviously is not. So what do Ruppert and his resident experts have to say about all of this? Dale Allen Pfeiffer, identified as the "FTW Contributing Editor for Energy," has written: "There is some speculation that oil is abiotic in origin -- generally asserting that oil is formed from magma instead of an organic origin. These ideas are really groundless." (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/04_04_02_oil_recession.html) Here is a question that I have for both Mr. Ruppert and Mr. Pfeiffer: Do you consider it honest, responsible journalism to dismiss a fifty year body of multi-disciplinary scientific research, conducted by hundreds of the world's most gifted scientists, as "some speculation"? The following is a response by McGowan to a generally hostile email from a Ruppert supporter... From phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu Wed Jun 11 06:14:39 2008 From: phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu (Damien Sullivan) Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:14:39 -0700 Subject: [ExI] dark matter (and -- shhhh! -- the F**** p-dox) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20080611061439.GA6796@ofb.net> On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 03:21:13PM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote: > Here's the deal. > > The talk about dark matter uses terms like "non-baryonic", and > otherwise asserts that dark matter is distinctly different from > regular matter. But I have yet to find any evidence for the > it-ain't-regular-matter presumption. The entire case, as far as I > have been able to determine, comes from the fact that the "matter" in > question is "dark". That, unlike "regular" matter, it can't be seen; No, the case is also based on the inferred distribution of the matter, and resulting lack of normal electromagnetic interactions; also on Big Bang models of nucleosynthesis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Matter -xx- Damien X-) From hkhenson at rogers.com Wed Jun 11 08:01:51 2008 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (hkhenson) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:01:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars In-Reply-To: <00f101c8cb87$9901e1c0$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <060520081810.11208.48482C2A000EA52700002BC82206999735010404079B9D0E@comcast.net> <200806060128.m561SXCM027764@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <1212784802_27098@s8.cableone.net> <006401c8caab$8dac3230$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1213162341_7679@s7.cableone.net> <00f101c8cb87$9901e1c0$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <1213171467_6078@s2.cableone.net> At 10:50 PM 6/10/2008, you wrote: snip >What is at stake here is the abiotic theory of oil. Hmm, now I see >http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/peakoil1.html >which appears to present both sides of the debate. The theory doesn't matter in the least. Whether the oil was cooked out of organic deposits from living things (as all indications point to for the western shale deposits) or it came from some deep dark crevice in the earth, the important thing is that we are close to or at the limit of how fast we can pump it. Keith From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Wed Jun 11 09:04:16 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:04:16 +0200 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <277344.68316.qm@web50301.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <580930c20806101044x4a51995ey3497936bedb7b3ed@mail.gmail.com> <277344.68316.qm@web50301.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <580930c20806110204o6da39d34ycd5a8f116ea7aed3@mail.gmail.com> On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 9:55 PM, Antonio Marcos wrote: > >In fact, why would death stop allegedly giving meaning to life if life > >is 40 years long rather than 20? Or 400? Or 40,000? > > exactly, and since every atom will most likely collapse eventually (as you > seem to also point to in your email) you can always say you're NOT immortal > =] so the alleged "meaning" would still stay there (mostly :)) > This is my point. In other terms, I consider mostly pointless to engage emphatically metaphysical objections on their turf, whenever there is no need for it, including when they are very debatable in nature. Either those who fancy themselves as the "advocates of the dignity of death" are actually suicidal (i.e., "the sooner, the better"), or they lack a real argument against transhumanism even with those who may share their views. That many actual transhumanists are far from sharing them is an entirely different issue. Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Wed Jun 11 09:29:13 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:29:13 +0200 Subject: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <580930c20806110229p36d0067eh3413add4200c0611@mail.gmail.com> On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 1:05 AM, Thomas wrote: > A clean, predator free environment might permit one to forego reproduction > (the need for an "after life") and focus effort on auto evolution and life > extension. As I see it, the probability of death would fall. The value of > life would soar and its meaning would expand as one achieved ever greater > beauty and happiness. Mmhhh. Actually, what I am mostly interested in is a progressively growing, and tendentially undefined, *lifespan*. In other terms, the ineluttability of the fact that as a cat roughly lives 15 years irrespective of how healthy his life may be and good his veterinarian, a human being may last 90 or 100 years, but no more than that, and with severe, unavoidable functional impairments for a substantial chunk of this duration. Then, "probability of death" may depend on factors that remain entirely within the scope of human self-determination, and I sincerely doubt that its reduction to zero would be an absolute, unconditional individual and societal goal. I would be reluctant, say, to forbid sport, including its extreme version, just because the price for the challenge and the adrenalyne rush might involve a diminished life expectancy for its practitioners. And what about exploration, experiments, expansion in different and possibly hostile environments, etc. etc.? Nicely, the words for all those activities start with an "ex", the same of "extropy"... :-) Stefano Vaj From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Wed Jun 11 09:41:57 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:41:57 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars In-Reply-To: <1213171467_6078@s2.cableone.net> References: <060520081810.11208.48482C2A000EA52700002BC82206999735010404079B9D0E@comcast.net> <200806060128.m561SXCM027764@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <1212784802_27098@s8.cableone.net> <006401c8caab$8dac3230$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1213162341_7679@s7.cableone.net> <00f101c8cb87$9901e1c0$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1213171467_6078@s2.cableone.net> Message-ID: <580930c20806110241r2586b45bie61c2ced6e322588@mail.gmail.com> On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 10:01 AM, hkhenson wrote: > At 10:50 PM 6/10/2008, you wrote: > The theory doesn't matter in the least. Whether the oil was cooked > out of organic deposits from living things (as all indications point > to for the western shale deposits) or it came from some deep dark > crevice in the earth, the important thing is that we are close to or > at the limit of how fast we can pump it. If I may step in, there is nothing especially mysterious AFAIK in oil and gas, whatever the origin of the "natural" deposit of the same may be. We can well enough syntesise both since at least II World War (I understand that Germany did it quite extensively), for whatever use of them we may think of, and whenever they may continue making sense as fuels or energy storage compound. The problem is that we need energy to do that, and of course such energy cannot be taken from... burning some other oil or gas, or even some alternative fossil fuel that is also limited in nature (say, coal). Thus, we have to profit more extensively and directly from the very process that has originally produced "natural" oil and gas, namely nuclear fusion, be it in artificial reactors or by going to space and getting it from "natural" reactors, i.e., stars. Then you can have all the oil and gas you like, but without waiting for the geological ages natural production involves. Not that you would need much, once the energy is already there. Stefano Vaj From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Jun 11 12:56:46 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 05:56:46 -0700 Subject: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" References: <580930c20806110229p36d0067eh3413add4200c0611@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <012e01c8cbc3$4a5a6b00$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stefano writes > Thomas wrote: > >> A clean, predator free environment might permit one to forego reproduction >> (the need for an "after life") and focus effort on auto evolution and life >> extension. Why would one wish to forego reproduction? Besides, this is an obviously very non-ESS (that is, non Evolutionarily Stable Strategy) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy As we are uploaded (probably), or replaced by mind children, or expand into space to escape the on-going Singularity in the solar system, I could not in good conscience recommend to any group of which I was a part a non-ESS. > Actually, what I am mostly interested in is a progressively > growing, and tendentially undefined, *lifespan*. Absolutely. Ignoring the ultimately silly "death gives meaning to life" crowd, you've stated the most important desirable characteristic of our future lives. > Then, "probability of death" may depend on factors that remain > entirely within the scope of human self-determination, and I sincerely > doubt that its reduction to zero would be an absolute, unconditional > individual and societal goal. Not at all. Huge numbers of science fiction writers, e.g. Egan, Broderick, Brin, and so on all the way back to Algis Budry's "Rogue Moon" in 1960, it's been understood that one will of course have "backups" throughout any region of space in exact analogy to off-site storage of important computer data. This is taken entirely for granted, for example, in Greg Egan's recent short story "Glory". > I would be reluctant, say, to forbid sport, including its extreme version, You mean, you would be reluctant to get together with your neighbors and elect a powerful government that would interfere with individual's decisions concerning things like suicide. Well, I'm glad to hear that. > just because the price for the > challenge and the adrenalyne rush might involve a diminished life > expectancy for its practitioners. And what about exploration, > experiments, expansion in different and possibly hostile environments, > etc. etc.? Nicely, the words for all those activities start with an > "ex", the same of "extropy"... :-) Further, if one eventually somehow incorporates the idea that one may live around Sol and at the "same time" live around Betelgeuse, then nothing stops one from contemplating having some versions of oneself decide to take great risks, though probably with nearby backups. I do not want to enter into another identity debate, but it would be comforting if the readers of this list at least acknowledged the intellectual possibility that accidental death can be made arbitrarily improbable. Lee From pgptag at gmail.com Wed Jun 11 13:54:11 2008 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:54:11 +0200 Subject: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <470a3c520806110654h43dbe00cm6c0c6ede7dc9bff0@mail.gmail.com> On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 1:05 AM, Thomas wrote: > From: Damien Broderick > Date: June 9, 2008 11:20:50 PM MST > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" > Reply-To: ExI chat list > > At 10:51 PM 6/9/2008 -0700, Lee wrote: > > I also agree with you strongly that we really cannot > charge the author of this wicked phrase with claiming > that death gives the only meaning to life, or even > that death gives the primary meaning to life. This "wicked phrase" is an evident nonsense, and the fact that more than enough people say it only shows that more than enough people and more than enough stupid, or clueless victims of religious propaganda. "Death gives meaning to life" is an evident nonsense because dead people cannot experience meaning. A similar sentence, "unhappiness gives meaning to happiness", is understood, by stupid or brainwashed people, in its literal meaning. But smart a##holes use it as "_your_ unhappiness gives meaning to _my_ happiness", which is the only logically consistent meaning of these nonsensical statements. From amcmr2003 at yahoo.com.br Wed Jun 11 14:14:09 2008 From: amcmr2003 at yahoo.com.br (Antonio Marcos) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 07:14:09 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" In-Reply-To: <470a3c520806110654h43dbe00cm6c0c6ede7dc9bff0@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <903782.84239.qm@web50309.mail.re2.yahoo.com> > which is the only logically consistent meaning of these nonsensical statements. You can also think as " the possibility of unhappiness gives meaning to my happiness" and "after Im unahppy, happiness is more happy". Regards, Mark. --- Em qua, 11/6/08, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 <pgptag at gmail.com> escreveu: De: Giu1i0 Pri5c0 <pgptag at gmail.com> Assunto: Re: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" Para: "ExI chat list" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> Data: Quarta-feira, 11 de Junho de 2008, 10:54 On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 1:05 AM, Thomas <thomas at thomasoliver.net> wrote: > From: Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> > Date: June 9, 2008 11:20:50 PM MST > To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > Subject: Re: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" > Reply-To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > > At 10:51 PM 6/9/2008 -0700, Lee wrote: > > I also agree with you strongly that we really cannot > charge the author of this wicked phrase with claiming > that death gives the only meaning to life, or even > that death gives the primary meaning to life. This "wicked phrase" is an evident nonsense, and the fact that more than enough people say it only shows that more than enough people and more than enough stupid, or clueless victims of religious propaganda. "Death gives meaning to life" is an evident nonsense because dead people cannot experience meaning. A similar sentence, "unhappiness gives meaning to happiness", is understood, by stupid or brainwashed people, in its literal meaning. But smart a##holes use it as "_your_ unhappiness gives meaning to _my_ happiness", which is the only logically consistent meaning of these nonsensical statements. _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat Abra sua conta no Yahoo! Mail, o ?nico sem limite de espa?o para armazenamento! http://br.mail.yahoo.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dagonweb at gmail.com Wed Jun 11 19:10:19 2008 From: dagonweb at gmail.com (Dagon Gmail) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:10:19 +0200 Subject: [ExI] dark matter (and -- shhhh! -- the F**** p-dox) In-Reply-To: <20080611061439.GA6796@ofb.net> References: <20080611061439.GA6796@ofb.net> Message-ID: So in the early universe there was a lot more matter, then all that turned sour, changed into dark matter nanoprobium, which then scatters diffusely into some very fleeting medium (which squares with the odd fact that heavier colliding galaxies seem to quickly strip the dark matter envelopes of their less massive dance partners - the nanoprobium migrates towards the area with more radiation to feed off) ...yet despite the clear abundance and pervasiveness of dark matter "nanoprobium" it is inert towards earth's primordial civilization - it doesn't contact earth, it doesn't suggest a course of action nor does it attempt to hinder or progress or attack us. If we move into the nanoprobium stage will there be welcome committee's? I mean there isn't even a hint, unless you dive headfirst into religious sect allegories. On 6/11/08, Damien Sullivan wrote: > On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 03:21:13PM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote: >> Here's the deal. >> >> The talk about dark matter uses terms like "non-baryonic", and >> otherwise asserts that dark matter is distinctly different from >> regular matter. But I have yet to find any evidence for the >> it-ain't-regular-matter presumption. The entire case, as far as I >> have been able to determine, comes from the fact that the "matter" in >> question is "dark". That, unlike "regular" matter, it can't be seen; > > No, the case is also based on the inferred distribution of the matter, > and resulting lack of normal electromagnetic interactions; also on Big > Bang models of nucleosynthesis. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Matter > > -xx- Damien X-) > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Jun 11 22:45:48 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:45:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" References: <470a3c520806110654h43dbe00cm6c0c6ede7dc9bff0@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <014c01c8cc15$5cf3f310$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Hi Giulio, Yes, I know that it's pretty frustrating to ever have to talk to these types of people, or to read what they write. But one's case is always weakened by overstatement. I'm actually surprised at this from you, of all people. > This "wicked phrase" is an evident nonsense, and the fact that more > than enough people say it only shows that more than enough people and > more than enough stupid, or clueless victims of religious propaganda. First, those people are not stupid. Second, they could make an equally vacuous argument saying that *we* were the ones who were victims of Darwinian brainwashing and were underestimating the wisdom of tradition. Third, quite a number of people who are *not* religious believe that "death gives meaning to life". I've read articles by them in the magazine "Free Inquiry". > "Death gives meaning to life" is an evident nonsense because dead > people cannot experience meaning. That is not what they *meant* at all! They (generally) do not claim that dead people have experiences---almost all of them are talking about the way that the possibility or certainty of death gives life more meaning *while* we are alive. So, yes, it's nonsense, but certainly not for the "reasons" you put forth. I can't understand why several people here have suddenly started sounding a good deal less than rational all of a sudden. I wonder if it's an aspect of mob psychology. We all want to refute that utterly wrongheaded statement, but some of us wish to do so without name-calling and instead by resort to careful argument. Best regards, Lee From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Jun 11 22:52:36 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:52:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" References: <990398.72101.qm@web50310.mail.re2.yahoo.com><009f01c8cabe$7b0e2260$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20080610010428.023a0fe8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <015c01c8cc16$118959a0$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Damien wrote > Lee wrote: > >> I also agree with you strongly that we really cannot >> charge the author of this wicked phrase with claiming >> that death gives the only meaning to life, or even >> that death gives the primary meaning to life. > > No, in my experience the way the phrase is trotted out usually > means exactly that--as one can see from the ancillary claptrap. I understand, and I do find your empirical claim quite credible. But we can't be in the business of refuting ideas and concepts because of their "ancillary claptrap". And thanks for your subsequent accurate analysis (below). Lee > [The (usually religious) often say] > "If there were no death, people would lose interest in everything, grow > terminally [!!] bored, drift into idle pleasure-seeking, stop caring > about each other, lose their righteous fear of God's punishment," > blah blah. It might be true, but we have no basis for asserting it, > except by analogy with brainless leeches who inherit great wealth and > ruin themselves; that has some force, but fails to take account of > other experiences with great wealth, such as Bill Gates's, say. > > But it's also true that a suppressed premise generally goes along the > lines of "interfering with the divine plan for humans," something > which is intrinsically, deontologically naughty but also prudentially > wrong since the true deep meaning of life is an afterlife that can > only be attained by dying. The meaning of a pupa's existence is the > butterfly imago. If that were true, and demonstrably so, my attitude > would be very different (as it was when I was young and more > gullible, poor pupa). But note: the status of the saved supernatural > imago is then purportedly *immortal* (in the major faiths, anyway) > and hence, one must suppose, ex hypothesi eternally *meaningless*... From lcorbin at rawbw.com Wed Jun 11 22:57:48 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:57:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] tommy emmanuel References: <200806110455.m5B4t2km026499@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <015f01c8cc16$c5d274f0$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Spike writes > Please pardon my off-topic, but god is with us, > he plays a guitar, and ooooh man this god can > play, whooooo. I have never seen the like of > this. Does this cat rage or what? Technically speaking, this cat rages. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ75Ent60ik > I am astounded at the things the human mind can do. Especially when it's driven and solely focused on achieving a particular aim. But never underestimate the genes. Also, *never* underestimate the environment. Yet most of all, never underestimate passion. Lee From thespike at satx.rr.com Wed Jun 11 23:08:40 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:08:40 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Tommy Emmanuel In-Reply-To: <015f01c8cc16$c5d274f0$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <200806110455.m5B4t2km026499@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <015f01c8cc16$c5d274f0$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080611180758.0244b9e8@satx.rr.com> Another fine Australian! :) From mfj.eav at gmail.com Wed Jun 11 23:24:42 2008 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:24:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] 08-Longevity Dividend: Health and Disability Message-ID: <61c8738e0806111624r1c174fc1yd0c567599c4b15db@mail.gmail.com> Health Canada and the FDA argue that aging is not a disease but a natural, unstoppable, inevitable process ; I would argue the middle ground, that aging is a progressive biological disability worthy of more than palliation". "Oh dad you are one sick puppy?everybody since the dawn of civilization until the 20th century who ever claimed there was a cure for aging has one thing in common, they are dead. "Putting Humpty Dumpty back together again " won't cure aging" Well kids, for over a decade I have been mentored by fellow members of The *World Transhumanist Association* , an international nonprofit membership organization which advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities ( http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/index/ ) . WTA supports the development of and access to new technologies that enable everyone to enjoy *better minds, better bodies* and *better lives*. In other words, WTA wants people to be *better than well. From what I have learned I think there is good reason to be optimistic about the future. http://www.wfs.org/MArch-April08/WF2008_preliminary.pdf* Idiot-Savants show the computational feats a mind can accomplish when its structures are organized in novel ways. ( http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/conditions/05/07/miraculous.memory/index.html ). Breaking the communications barrier for autistic brains will bring happiness and purpose to imprisoned personalities. Every technology designed to make life indistinguishable from normal for the disabled can be adapted to enhance the abilities of the able bodied. For example scientists pushing themselves harder to be smarter are now major consumers of ritalan a drug popularized for hyperactive kids. http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2006/07/07/heinbaugh.blind.reader.affl , http://www.knfbreader.com/ document the dividend digital technology is now able to provide to blind persons. Disabled persons at this stage of technology might resemble movie cyborgs because the mechanical and electronic devices are clunky; but they do work. Raymond Kurzweil's "universal language translator" device and software and ( http://www.physorg.com/news130152277.html ) a baseball cap wired to allow EEG to control household electronics devices , for physically disabled individuals, for home care for the elderly, medical monitoring, and exercise training are disjoint technologies that are breaking new ground ( http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2008/matsuoka) . Oscar Pisorius ( http://womensbioethics.blogspot.com/2008/05/bionic-athletes-stepping-out-of-debate.html ) made able bodied athletes feel disadvantaged, like he did before his new legs. (http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/cascio20080504/ ). One may think of disability as a critical catastrophic fault supported by long creeping degenerative processes. http://www.gsexperience.com/gseblog.html and http://www.gsexperience.com/archive/index.html describe a potential mechanism for a systemic disease (spalting) which may develop in humans who survive well beyond what we consider old and pose monumental new health challenges. Fortunately large scale Anti-Aging Research funders are popping up in every country. Example ( http://www.bg-rf.org.uk/ ) The Biogerontology Research Foundation (BGRF) understands that the current scientific understanding of the ageing process is not yet sufficiently exploited to produce effective commercial medical interventions. BGRF funded research is building on the body of knowledge about how ageing happens, and develop biotechnological interventions to prevent or remediate the molecular and cellular deficits which accumulate with age and which underlie the ill-health of old age. Addressing ageing damage at this most fundamental level provides an important opportunity to produce the effective, lasting treatments for the diseases and disabilities of ageing that are required to improve quality of life in the elderly. BDRF addresses both the symptoms of age-related diseases and the mechanisms of those diseases. USA Lawmakers may 07, 2008 introduced legislation designed to speed the development of new, safer therapies for brain and nervous system disorders and injuries, which affect an estimated 100 million Americans and costs an estimated $1.3 trillion annually to treat. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=legislation-introduced-to According to http://www.Chronicdiseaseimpact.comforward planning to eliminate future disability can have a significant payback. The difference in 2050 USA GDP for eliminating disability at all ages is projected to be 5.668 Trillion (17.6% of 2050 GDP) per annum. Biomarkers may soon predict disabling diseases like alzheimers before even the sufferer is aware of it. http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20783/?nlid=1079&a=f Raymond Kurzweil ( http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=1 )views the body as a complex software program coded as DNA.. It's the millions of feedback loops from all the subroutines and derivative epigenetic material that make us what we are as much as the mere 100K "Kernel" of "source code " within our genes Ray believes that the convergence of nano-cognitive biological-information (NCBI) technology into a new "singularity" technology and its commercialization is about 10-20 years away. Feb 21, 1963 John F. Kennedy said "It is not enough for a great nation to have added new years to life. Our objective must also be to add new life to those years". To put myself at risk of being partisan , we need to repeat the pledge to "put a man on the moon before the end of the decade" in the form of a new pledge " to end physical and mental disability for the average global citizen before 2025". Governments around the world must put pro-life ahead of pro-death and lead by consorting with technologists and futurists and not by fashioning "Garbage in , garbage out" health policy created and implemented by permission from "Idiot-Savant" pollsters and "spin doctors". Don't laugh that's how it works. Harrison Ford at the end of Indiana Jones saga (4) says "A prize greater than a city of Gold is knowledge". As we prevent disability we enhance the wisdom of old age to become a true asset. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/health/research/20brai.html?_r=1&oref=slogin . You may send your feedback attention "Pharmer Mo" at extropian.pharmer at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Wed Jun 11 23:26:03 2008 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:26:03 +0000 Subject: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" In-Reply-To: <014c01c8cc15$5cf3f310$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <470a3c520806110654h43dbe00cm6c0c6ede7dc9bff0@mail.gmail.com> <014c01c8cc15$5cf3f310$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 10:45 PM, Lee Corbin wrote: > That is not what they *meant* at all! They (generally) do > not claim that dead people have experiences---almost all > of them are talking about the way that the possibility or > certainty of death gives life more meaning *while* we > are alive. So, yes, it's nonsense, but certainly not for the > "reasons" you put forth. > I'm not so sure that it's nonsense. >From the point of view that we would quite like to live for ever, then certainly it doesn't appeal much to this forum. But time pressure has a way of concentrating the mind. If you know that you only have a limited time here, then you have to consider what you would like to do with that time. The fact of death gives an urgency to life and causes people to philosophize about the meaning of life. If nobody ever died, and life just goes on with no end, then there is less pressure to do stuff. They can always do it next year if they want to. There is also greater significance if you sacrifice your life for something. But obviously there is still meaning to be found in life, even without the shadow of death. It just has a different .......... 'flavor'. BillK From mfj.eav at gmail.com Wed Jun 11 23:46:57 2008 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:46:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] longevity-dividend-08- extropy-chat Digest, Vol 57, Issue 8 Message-ID: <61c8738e0806111646m2739b0feqe23f6fd1e1c4a699@mail.gmail.com> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Date: Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 4:25 PM Subject: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 57, Issue 8 To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Send extropy-chat mailing list submissions to extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to extropy-chat-request at lists.extropy.org You can reach the person managing the list at extropy-chat-owner at lists.extropy.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of extropy-chat digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: Technology- When it works (A story) (Lee Corbin) 2. Re: "death gives meaning to life" (Stefano Vaj) 3. Re: "death gives meaning to life" (Antonio Marcos) 4. Re: "Death gives meaning to life?" (Thomas) 5. tommy emmanuel (spike) 6. Re: Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars (hkhenson) 7. Re: Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars (Lee Corbin) 8. Re: dark matter (and -- shhhh! -- the F**** p-dox) (Damien Sullivan) 9. Re: Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars (hkhenson) 10. Re: "death gives meaning to life" (Stefano Vaj) 11. Re: "Death gives meaning to life?" (Stefano Vaj) 12. Re: Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars (Stefano Vaj) 13. Re: "Death gives meaning to life?" (Lee Corbin) 14. Re: "Death gives meaning to life?" (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) 15. Re: "Death gives meaning to life?" (Antonio Marcos) 16. Re: dark matter (and -- shhhh! -- the F**** p-dox) (Dagon Gmail) 17. Re: "Death gives meaning to life?" (Lee Corbin) 18. Re: "death gives meaning to life" (Lee Corbin) 19. Re: tommy emmanuel (Lee Corbin) 20. Re: Tommy Emmanuel (Damien Broderick) 21. 08-Longevity Dividend: Health and Disability (Morris Johnson) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:55:25 -0700 From: "Lee Corbin" Subject: Re: [ExI] Technology- When it works (A story) To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <00cf01c8cb0a$2b06b330$6401a8c0 at homeef7b612677> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; reply-type=original MB writes > Sorta disgusting how easily one can get pregnant when young > and unmarried and unable to support even oneself... only to be > sharply constrained in the later efforts when > one is in a position to have a family. Not so surprising, actually. Funny thing is, there have been *traditions* and instincts going back many thousands of years concerning when to start families and have children. But of course, all the twentieth century people were far too rational, far too intelligent, and far too creative to listen to old fuddy-duddy traditions and "animal" instincts. Instead, they opted to have their cake and eat it too: plenty of sex with no cost, thanks to the pill. Hayek spells it out plainly: while we must investigate changing our traditions when they no longer seem to be appropriate, we should do so very cautiously and above all, we should try to change only one thing at a time. But the "revolutionary" meme set born in the French Revolution just doesn't see it that way, and so the price is paid. Give parents, teachers, churches, and traditions as much extra leeway you possibly can. Their traditions did *not* arise just by chance, and are *not* just old-fashioned fuddy-duddy nonsense. They are the product of survival evolution, both cultural and genetic. When in doubt, conform. I've made a lot of mistakes in my life due to plain stubborness, and to how "illogical" I found so many customs and traditions to be when I was younger. Of course we must be individuals, and of course we must question authority. But people should learn to do so only very cautiously and tentatively. Lee ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:44:38 +0200 From: "Stefano Vaj" Subject: Re: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <580930c20806101044x4a51995ey3497936bedb7b3ed at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 12:30 AM, John K Clark wrote: > If true then death must be the ONLY thing that gives life meaning, > the one and only thing we should concern ourselves with is death, > everything else is trivial. And that's about as depressing a > philosophy as I can imagine! Whatever. While one may well like arguing that death does *not* give meaning to life in one sense or another, all the related arguments are obviously overkill. In fact, why would death stop allegedly giving meaning to life if life is 40 years long rather than 20? Or 400? Or 40,000? Whatever weight the idea might carry with it, it would only have a relevance if one were faced with a literally *eternal* prospective, "eternal" as in "continued subjectivity beyond the entropic death of the universe, whatever may happen in the meantime and afterwards". While the subject may have some philosophical appeal to some of us, it has, strictly speaking, very little to do with any practical choice about longevist measures. And by far the best approach, IMHO, is to ridicule those who should like to make such a great fuss upon the relatively trivial, and time-honoured, policy of attempting to extend one's life expectancy all other things being equal. Stefano Vaj ------------------------------ Message: 3 Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:55:30 -0700 (PDT) From: Antonio Marcos Subject: Re: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <277344.68316.qm at web50301.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" >In fact, why would death stop allegedly giving meaning to life if life >is 40 years long rather than 20? Or 400? Or 40,000? exactly, and since every atom will most likely collapse eventually (as you seem to also point to in your email) you can always say you're NOT immortal =] so the alleged "meaning" would still stay there (mostly :) ) [] Marcos. --- Em ter, 10/6/08, Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> escreveu: De: Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com > Assunto: Re: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" Para: "ExI chat list" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > Data: Ter?a-feira, 10 de Junho de 2008, 14:44 On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 12:30 AM, John K Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net> wrote: > If true then death must be the ONLY thing that gives life meaning, > the one and only thing we should concern ourselves with is death, > everything else is trivial. And that's about as depressing a > philosophy as I can imagine! Whatever. While one may well like arguing that death does *not* give meaning to life in one sense or another, all the related arguments are obviously overkill. In fact, why would death stop allegedly giving meaning to life if life is 40 years long rather than 20? Or 400? Or 40,000? Whatever weight the idea might carry with it, it would only have a relevance if one were faced with a literally *eternal* prospective, "eternal" as in "continued subjectivity beyond the entropic death of the universe, whatever may happen in the meantime and afterwards". While the subject may have some philosophical appeal to some of us, it has, strictly speaking, very little to do with any practical choice about longevist measures. And by far the best approach, IMHO, is to ridicule those who should like to make such a great fuss upon the relatively trivial, and time-honoured, policy of attempting to extend one's life expectancy all other things being equal. Stefano Vaj _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat Abra sua conta no Yahoo! Mail, o ?nico sem limite de espa?o para armazenamento! http://br.mail.yahoo.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20080610/5ef3332b/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 4 Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:05:56 -0700 From: Thomas Subject: Re: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > From: Damien Broderick > Date: June 9, 2008 11:20:50 PM MST > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" > Reply-To: ExI chat list > > > At 10:51 PM 6/9/2008 -0700, Lee wrote: > >> I also agree with you strongly that we really cannot >> charge the author of this wicked phrase with claiming >> that death gives the only meaning to life, or even >> that death gives the primary meaning to life. > > No, in my experience the way the phrase is trotted out usually > means exactly that--as one can see from the ancillary claptrap. "If > there were no death, people would lose interest in everything, grow > terminally [!!] bored, drift into idle pleasure-seeking, stop > caring about each other, lose their righteous fear of God's > punishment," blah blah. It might be true, but we have no basis for > asserting it, except by analogy with brainless leeches who inherit > great wealth and ruin themselves; that has some force, but fails to > take account of other experiences with great wealth, such as Bill > Gates's, say. > > But it's also true that a suppressed premise generally goes along > the lines of "interfering with the divine plan for humans," > something which is intrinsically, deontologically naughty but also > prudentially wrong since the true deep meaning of life is an > afterlife that can only be attained by dying. The meaning of a > pupa's existence is the butterfly imago. If that were true, and > demonstrably so, my attitude would be very different (as it was > when I was young and more gullible, poor pupa). But note: the > status of the saved supernatural imago is then purportedly > *immortal* (in the major faiths, anyway) and hence, one must > suppose, ex hypothesi eternally *meaningless*. Oh woe! Wouldn't it > rot your boots! > > Damien Broderick Yes, metamorphosis serves as a poor analogy for death since it involves self generated change, a quality of life, not death. I think the death anti-value gets used by predators to survive. If one survives as a killer, then the meaning of life becomes linked to death. It occurs to me that replication began as a device for accommodating death where the individual's indefinite survival seemed untenable. Then, when cells began sticking together it became a device for growth and increased individual organism survival. It seems to me that an extropian organism, interested in personal survival might do well to learn to fuel itself without resorting to death (predation). Years ago ASU developed cell-like machines to photosynthesize ATP. Then one could distance oneself from the society of predators who rely on death genes and death memes (sacrifice). Humans seem to pose the biggest threat to humans and transhumans. A clean, predator free environment might permit one to forego reproduction (the need for an "after life") and focus effort on auto evolution and life extension. As I see it, the probability of death would fall. The value of life would soar and its meaning would expand as one achieved ever greater beauty and happiness. The increasingly remote possibility of death might remain providing the zero reference point for the immense value and deep meaning of life. -- Thomas Oliver -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20080610/f97cc4da/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 5 Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:28:21 -0700 From: "spike" Subject: [ExI] tommy emmanuel To: "'ExI chat list'" Message-ID: <200806110455.m5B4t2km026499 at andromeda.ziaspace.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Please pardon my off-topic, but god is with us, he plays a guitar, and ooooh man this god can play, whooooo. I have never seen the like of this. Does this cat rage or what? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ75Ent60ik I am astounded at the things the human mind can do. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20080610/4fb25298/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 6 Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:29:45 -0700 From: hkhenson Subject: Re: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars To: Lee Corbin , ExI chat list Message-ID: <1213162341_7679 at s7.cableone.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed At 08:37 PM 6/9/2008, Lee wrote: >Keith wrote > > > > Overall, nCO2 + 3n+1H2 --> H(CH2)nH + nH2O > > That's where oil came from in the first place. > >What I read was that no one has ever succeeded in >producing one drop of oil by any process that nature >could have used to produce the vast amounts of >"fossil fuels" we have found. You are misinformed. >Do you have some explanation of how nature would >have gone about using the above equation, or whether >it's true that so far no one has produced oil in a way >that is thought to be how nature did it? You are probably aware of shale oil. We produce oil from it the same way nature did other oil deposits, heat it. If that particular deposit of natural hydrocarbons were to be buried deep in the earth where it gets hot, say under a deposit of sand capped with a layer of limestone, then it would turn into an oil deposit, a really vast oil deposit. No mystery. Keith ------------------------------ Message: 7 Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:50:50 -0700 From: "Lee Corbin" Subject: Re: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <00f101c8cb87$9901e1c0$6401a8c0 at homeef7b612677> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; reply-type=response Keith writes >>What I read was that no one has ever succeeded in >>producing one drop of oil by any process that nature >>could have used to produce the vast amounts of >>"fossil fuels" we have found. > > You are misinformed. Judging from what you write below, you may have mistaken my meaning. >>Do you have some explanation of how nature would >>have gone about using the above equation, or whether >>it's true that so far no one has produced oil in a way >>that is thought to be how nature did it? > > You are probably aware of shale oil. We produce oil from it the same way nature did other oil deposits, heat it. But did shale oil come from "dinosaurs" :-) or from living matter? It's customary for everyone to call these "fossil fuels" isn't it? What is at stake here is the abiotic theory of oil. Hmm, now I see http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/peakoil1.html which appears to present both sides of the debate. < Dave McGowan argues for the abiotic theory, which holds that oil is generated by natural processes in the earth's magma, and he also argues pointedly that the "fossil" theory has never been proven. The following is long and detailed, but a must-read: > Lee P.S. Here is McGowan's take (Yes, Damien, I *am* biased) The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins is not controversial nor presently a matter of academic debate. The period of debate about this extensive body of knowledge has been over for approximately two decades (Simakov 1986). The modern theory is presently applied extensively throughout the former U.S.S.R. as the guiding perspective for petroleum exploration and development projects. There are presently more than 80 oil and gas fields in the Caspian district alone which were explored and developed by applying the perspective of the modern theory and which produce from the crystalline basement rock. (Krayushkin, Chebanenko et al. 1994) Similarly, such exploration in the western Siberia cratonic-rift sedimentary basin has developed 90 petroleum fields of which 80 produce either partly or entirely from the crystalline basement. The exploration and discoveries of the 11 major and 1 giant fields on the northern flank of the Dneiper-Donets basin have already been noted. There are presently deep drilling exploration projects under way in Azerbaijan, Tatarstan, and Asian Siberia directed to testing potential oil and gas reservoirs in the crystalline basement. ( http://www.gasresources.net/index.htm) It appears that, unbeknownst to Westerners, there have actually been, for quite some time now, two competing theories concerning the origins of petroleum. One theory claims that oil is an organic 'fossil fuel' deposited in finite quantities near the planet's surface. The other theory claims that oil is continuously generated by natural processes in the Earth's magma. One theory is backed by a massive body of research representing fifty years of intense scientific inquiry. The other theory is an unproven relic of the eighteenth century. One theory anticipates deep oil reserves, refillable oil fields, migratory oil systems, deep sources of generation, and the spontaneous venting of gas and oil. The other theory has a difficult time explaining any such documented phenomena. So which theory have we in the West, in our infinite wisdom, chosen to embrace? Why, the fundamentally absurd 'Fossil Fuel' theory, of course -- the same theory that the 'Peak Oil' doomsday warnings are based on. I am sorry to report here, by the way, that in doing my homework, I never did come across any of that "hard science" documenting 'Peak Oil' that Mr. Strahl referred to. All the 'Peak Oil' literature that I found, on Ruppert's site and elsewhere, took for granted that petroleum is a non-renewable 'fossil fuel.' That theory is never questioned, nor is any effort made to validate it. It is simply taken to be an established scientific fact, which it quite obviously is not. So what do Ruppert and his resident experts have to say about all of this? Dale Allen Pfeiffer, identified as the "FTW Contributing Editor for Energy," has written: "There is some speculation that oil is abiotic in origin -- generally asserting that oil is formed from magma instead of an organic origin. These ideas are really groundless." (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/04_04_02_oil_recession.html) Here is a question that I have for both Mr. Ruppert and Mr. Pfeiffer: Do you consider it honest, responsible journalism to dismiss a fifty year body of multi-disciplinary scientific research, conducted by hundreds of the world's most gifted scientists, as "some speculation"? The following is a response by McGowan to a generally hostile email from a Ruppert supporter... ------------------------------ Message: 8 Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:14:39 -0700 From: Damien Sullivan Subject: Re: [ExI] dark matter (and -- shhhh! -- the F**** p-dox) To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <20080611061439.GA6796 at ofb.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 03:21:13PM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote: > Here's the deal. > > The talk about dark matter uses terms like "non-baryonic", and > otherwise asserts that dark matter is distinctly different from > regular matter. But I have yet to find any evidence for the > it-ain't-regular-matter presumption. The entire case, as far as I > have been able to determine, comes from the fact that the "matter" in > question is "dark". That, unlike "regular" matter, it can't be seen; No, the case is also based on the inferred distribution of the matter, and resulting lack of normal electromagnetic interactions; also on Big Bang models of nucleosynthesis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Matter -xx- Damien X-) ------------------------------ Message: 9 Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:01:51 -0700 From: hkhenson Subject: Re: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <1213171467_6078 at s2.cableone.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed At 10:50 PM 6/10/2008, you wrote: snip >What is at stake here is the abiotic theory of oil. Hmm, now I see >http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/peakoil1.html >which appears to present both sides of the debate. The theory doesn't matter in the least. Whether the oil was cooked out of organic deposits from living things (as all indications point to for the western shale deposits) or it came from some deep dark crevice in the earth, the important thing is that we are close to or at the limit of how fast we can pump it. Keith ------------------------------ Message: 10 Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:04:16 +0200 From: "Stefano Vaj" Subject: Re: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" To: amcmr2003 at yahoo.com.br, "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <580930c20806110204o6da39d34ycd5a8f116ea7aed3 at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 9:55 PM, Antonio Marcos wrote: > >In fact, why would death stop allegedly giving meaning to life if life > >is 40 years long rather than 20? Or 400? Or 40,000? > > exactly, and since every atom will most likely collapse eventually (as you > seem to also point to in your email) you can always say you're NOT immortal > =] so the alleged "meaning" would still stay there (mostly :)) > This is my point. In other terms, I consider mostly pointless to engage emphatically metaphysical objections on their turf, whenever there is no need for it, including when they are very debatable in nature. Either those who fancy themselves as the "advocates of the dignity of death" are actually suicidal (i.e., "the sooner, the better"), or they lack a real argument against transhumanism even with those who may share their views. That many actual transhumanists are far from sharing them is an entirely different issue. Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20080611/e7bc610b/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 11 Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:29:13 +0200 From: "Stefano Vaj" Subject: Re: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <580930c20806110229p36d0067eh3413add4200c0611 at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 1:05 AM, Thomas wrote: > A clean, predator free environment might permit one to forego reproduction > (the need for an "after life") and focus effort on auto evolution and life > extension. As I see it, the probability of death would fall. The value of > life would soar and its meaning would expand as one achieved ever greater > beauty and happiness. Mmhhh. Actually, what I am mostly interested in is a progressively growing, and tendentially undefined, *lifespan*. In other terms, the ineluttability of the fact that as a cat roughly lives 15 years irrespective of how healthy his life may be and good his veterinarian, a human being may last 90 or 100 years, but no more than that, and with severe, unavoidable functional impairments for a substantial chunk of this duration. Then, "probability of death" may depend on factors that remain entirely within the scope of human self-determination, and I sincerely doubt that its reduction to zero would be an absolute, unconditional individual and societal goal. I would be reluctant, say, to forbid sport, including its extreme version, just because the price for the challenge and the adrenalyne rush might involve a diminished life expectancy for its practitioners. And what about exploration, experiments, expansion in different and possibly hostile environments, etc. etc.? Nicely, the words for all those activities start with an "ex", the same of "extropy"... :-) Stefano Vaj ------------------------------ Message: 12 Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:41:57 +0200 From: "Stefano Vaj" Subject: Re: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <580930c20806110241r2586b45bie61c2ced6e322588 at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 10:01 AM, hkhenson wrote: > At 10:50 PM 6/10/2008, you wrote: > The theory doesn't matter in the least. Whether the oil was cooked > out of organic deposits from living things (as all indications point > to for the western shale deposits) or it came from some deep dark > crevice in the earth, the important thing is that we are close to or > at the limit of how fast we can pump it. If I may step in, there is nothing especially mysterious AFAIK in oil and gas, whatever the origin of the "natural" deposit of the same may be. We can well enough syntesise both since at least II World War (I understand that Germany did it quite extensively), for whatever use of them we may think of, and whenever they may continue making sense as fuels or energy storage compound. The problem is that we need energy to do that, and of course such energy cannot be taken from... burning some other oil or gas, or even some alternative fossil fuel that is also limited in nature (say, coal). Thus, we have to profit more extensively and directly from the very process that has originally produced "natural" oil and gas, namely nuclear fusion, be it in artificial reactors or by going to space and getting it from "natural" reactors, i.e., stars. Then you can have all the oil and gas you like, but without waiting for the geological ages natural production involves. Not that you would need much, once the energy is already there. Stefano Vaj ------------------------------ Message: 13 Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 05:56:46 -0700 From: "Lee Corbin" Subject: Re: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <012e01c8cbc3$4a5a6b00$6401a8c0 at homeef7b612677> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; reply-type=original Stefano writes > Thomas wrote: > >> A clean, predator free environment might permit one to forego reproduction >> (the need for an "after life") and focus effort on auto evolution and life >> extension. Why would one wish to forego reproduction? Besides, this is an obviously very non-ESS (that is, non Evolutionarily Stable Strategy) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy As we are uploaded (probably), or replaced by mind children, or expand into space to escape the on-going Singularity in the solar system, I could not in good conscience recommend to any group of which I was a part a non-ESS. > Actually, what I am mostly interested in is a progressively > growing, and tendentially undefined, *lifespan*. Absolutely. Ignoring the ultimately silly "death gives meaning to life" crowd, you've stated the most important desirable characteristic of our future lives. > Then, "probability of death" may depend on factors that remain > entirely within the scope of human self-determination, and I sincerely > doubt that its reduction to zero would be an absolute, unconditional > individual and societal goal. Not at all. Huge numbers of science fiction writers, e.g. Egan, Broderick, Brin, and so on all the way back to Algis Budry's "Rogue Moon" in 1960, it's been understood that one will of course have "backups" throughout any region of space in exact analogy to off-site storage of important computer data. This is taken entirely for granted, for example, in Greg Egan's recent short story "Glory". > I would be reluctant, say, to forbid sport, including its extreme version, You mean, you would be reluctant to get together with your neighbors and elect a powerful government that would interfere with individual's decisions concerning things like suicide. Well, I'm glad to hear that. > just because the price for the > challenge and the adrenalyne rush might involve a diminished life > expectancy for its practitioners. And what about exploration, > experiments, expansion in different and possibly hostile environments, > etc. etc.? Nicely, the words for all those activities start with an > "ex", the same of "extropy"... :-) Further, if one eventually somehow incorporates the idea that one may live around Sol and at the "same time" live around Betelgeuse, then nothing stops one from contemplating having some versions of oneself decide to take great risks, though probably with nearby backups. I do not want to enter into another identity debate, but it would be comforting if the readers of this list at least acknowledged the intellectual possibility that accidental death can be made arbitrarily improbable. Lee ------------------------------ Message: 14 Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:54:11 +0200 From: "Giu1i0 Pri5c0" Subject: Re: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <470a3c520806110654h43dbe00cm6c0c6ede7dc9bff0 at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 1:05 AM, Thomas wrote: > From: Damien Broderick > Date: June 9, 2008 11:20:50 PM MST > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" > Reply-To: ExI chat list > > At 10:51 PM 6/9/2008 -0700, Lee wrote: > > I also agree with you strongly that we really cannot > charge the author of this wicked phrase with claiming > that death gives the only meaning to life, or even > that death gives the primary meaning to life. This "wicked phrase" is an evident nonsense, and the fact that more than enough people say it only shows that more than enough people and more than enough stupid, or clueless victims of religious propaganda. "Death gives meaning to life" is an evident nonsense because dead people cannot experience meaning. A similar sentence, "unhappiness gives meaning to happiness", is understood, by stupid or brainwashed people, in its literal meaning. But smart a##holes use it as "_your_ unhappiness gives meaning to _my_ happiness", which is the only logically consistent meaning of these nonsensical statements. ------------------------------ Message: 15 Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 07:14:09 -0700 (PDT) From: Antonio Marcos Subject: Re: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <903782.84239.qm at web50309.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > which is the only logically consistent meaning of these nonsensical statements. You can also think as " the possibility of unhappiness gives meaning to my happiness" and "after Im unahppy, happiness is more happy". Regards, Mark. --- Em qua, 11/6/08, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 <pgptag at gmail.com> escreveu: De: Giu1i0 Pri5c0 <pgptag at gmail.com > Assunto: Re: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" Para: "ExI chat list" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > Data: Quarta-feira, 11 de Junho de 2008, 10:54 On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 1:05 AM, Thomas <thomas at thomasoliver.net> wrote: > From: Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com > > Date: June 9, 2008 11:20:50 PM MST > To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > Subject: Re: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" > Reply-To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > > At 10:51 PM 6/9/2008 -0700, Lee wrote: > > I also agree with you strongly that we really cannot > charge the author of this wicked phrase with claiming > that death gives the only meaning to life, or even > that death gives the primary meaning to life. This "wicked phrase" is an evident nonsense, and the fact that more than enough people say it only shows that more than enough people and more than enough stupid, or clueless victims of religious propaganda. "Death gives meaning to life" is an evident nonsense because dead people cannot experience meaning. A similar sentence, "unhappiness gives meaning to happiness", is understood, by stupid or brainwashed people, in its literal meaning. But smart a##holes use it as "_your_ unhappiness gives meaning to _my_ happiness", which is the only logically consistent meaning of these nonsensical statements. _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat Abra sua conta no Yahoo! Mail, o ?nico sem limite de espa?o para armazenamento! http://br.mail.yahoo.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20080611/0a4f5d3b/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 16 Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:10:19 +0200 From: "Dagon Gmail" Subject: Re: [ExI] dark matter (and -- shhhh! -- the F**** p-dox) To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 So in the early universe there was a lot more matter, then all that turned sour, changed into dark matter nanoprobium, which then scatters diffusely into some very fleeting medium (which squares with the odd fact that heavier colliding galaxies seem to quickly strip the dark matter envelopes of their less massive dance partners - the nanoprobium migrates towards the area with more radiation to feed off) ...yet despite the clear abundance and pervasiveness of dark matter "nanoprobium" it is inert towards earth's primordial civilization - it doesn't contact earth, it doesn't suggest a course of action nor does it attempt to hinder or progress or attack us. If we move into the nanoprobium stage will there be welcome committee's? I mean there isn't even a hint, unless you dive headfirst into religious sect allegories. On 6/11/08, Damien Sullivan wrote: > On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 03:21:13PM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote: >> Here's the deal. >> >> The talk about dark matter uses terms like "non-baryonic", and >> otherwise asserts that dark matter is distinctly different from >> regular matter. But I have yet to find any evidence for the >> it-ain't-regular-matter presumption. The entire case, as far as I >> have been able to determine, comes from the fact that the "matter" in >> question is "dark". That, unlike "regular" matter, it can't be seen; > > No, the case is also based on the inferred distribution of the matter, > and resulting lack of normal electromagnetic interactions; also on Big > Bang models of nucleosynthesis. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Matter > > -xx- Damien X-) > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > ------------------------------ Message: 17 Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:45:48 -0700 From: "Lee Corbin" Subject: Re: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <014c01c8cc15$5cf3f310$6401a8c0 at homeef7b612677> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; reply-type=original Hi Giulio, Yes, I know that it's pretty frustrating to ever have to talk to these types of people, or to read what they write. But one's case is always weakened by overstatement. I'm actually surprised at this from you, of all people. > This "wicked phrase" is an evident nonsense, and the fact that more > than enough people say it only shows that more than enough people and > more than enough stupid, or clueless victims of religious propaganda. First, those people are not stupid. Second, they could make an equally vacuous argument saying that *we* were the ones who were victims of Darwinian brainwashing and were underestimating the wisdom of tradition. Third, quite a number of people who are *not* religious believe that "death gives meaning to life". I've read articles by them in the magazine "Free Inquiry". > "Death gives meaning to life" is an evident nonsense because dead > people cannot experience meaning. That is not what they *meant* at all! They (generally) do not claim that dead people have experiences---almost all of them are talking about the way that the possibility or certainty of death gives life more meaning *while* we are alive. So, yes, it's nonsense, but certainly not for the "reasons" you put forth. I can't understand why several people here have suddenly started sounding a good deal less than rational all of a sudden. I wonder if it's an aspect of mob psychology. We all want to refute that utterly wrongheaded statement, but some of us wish to do so without name-calling and instead by resort to careful argument. Best regards, Lee ------------------------------ Message: 18 Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:52:36 -0700 From: "Lee Corbin" Subject: Re: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <015c01c8cc16$118959a0$6401a8c0 at homeef7b612677> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; reply-type=original Damien wrote > Lee wrote: > >> I also agree with you strongly that we really cannot >> charge the author of this wicked phrase with claiming >> that death gives the only meaning to life, or even >> that death gives the primary meaning to life. > > No, in my experience the way the phrase is trotted out usually > means exactly that--as one can see from the ancillary claptrap. I understand, and I do find your empirical claim quite credible. But we can't be in the business of refuting ideas and concepts because of their "ancillary claptrap". And thanks for your subsequent accurate analysis (below). Lee > [The (usually religious) often say] > "If there were no death, people would lose interest in everything, grow > terminally [!!] bored, drift into idle pleasure-seeking, stop caring > about each other, lose their righteous fear of God's punishment," > blah blah. It might be true, but we have no basis for asserting it, > except by analogy with brainless leeches who inherit great wealth and > ruin themselves; that has some force, but fails to take account of > other experiences with great wealth, such as Bill Gates's, say. > > But it's also true that a suppressed premise generally goes along the > lines of "interfering with the divine plan for humans," something > which is intrinsically, deontologically naughty but also prudentially > wrong since the true deep meaning of life is an afterlife that can > only be attained by dying. The meaning of a pupa's existence is the > butterfly imago. If that were true, and demonstrably so, my attitude > would be very different (as it was when I was young and more > gullible, poor pupa). But note: the status of the saved supernatural > imago is then purportedly *immortal* (in the major faiths, anyway) > and hence, one must suppose, ex hypothesi eternally *meaningless*... ------------------------------ Message: 19 Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:57:48 -0700 From: "Lee Corbin" Subject: Re: [ExI] tommy emmanuel To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <015f01c8cc16$c5d274f0$6401a8c0 at homeef7b612677> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; reply-type=original Spike writes > Please pardon my off-topic, but god is with us, > he plays a guitar, and ooooh man this god can > play, whooooo. I have never seen the like of > this. Does this cat rage or what? Technically speaking, this cat rages. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ75Ent60ik > I am astounded at the things the human mind can do. Especially when it's driven and solely focused on achieving a particular aim. But never underestimate the genes. Also, *never* underestimate the environment. Yet most of all, never underestimate passion. Lee ------------------------------ Message: 20 Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:08:40 -0500 From: Damien Broderick Subject: Re: [ExI] Tommy Emmanuel To: ExI chat list Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080611180758.0244b9e8 at satx.rr.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Another fine Australian! :) ------------------------------ Message: 21 Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:24:42 -0700 From: "Morris Johnson" Subject: [ExI] 08-Longevity Dividend: Health and Disability To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <61c8738e0806111624r1c174fc1yd0c567599c4b15db at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" Health Canada and the FDA argue that aging is not a disease but a natural, unstoppable, inevitable process ; I would argue the middle ground, that aging is a progressive biological disability worthy of more than palliation". "Oh dad you are one sick puppy?everybody since the dawn of civilization until the 20th century who ever claimed there was a cure for aging has one thing in common, they are dead. "Putting Humpty Dumpty back together again " won't cure aging" Well kids, for over a decade I have been mentored by fellow members of The *World Transhumanist Association* , an international nonprofit membership organization which advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities ( http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/index/ ) . WTA supports the development of and access to new technologies that enable everyone to enjoy *better minds, better bodies* and *better lives*. In other words, WTA wants people to be *better than well. From what I have learned I think there is good reason to be optimistic about the future. http://www.wfs.org/MArch-April08/WF2008_preliminary.pdf* Idiot-Savants show the computational feats a mind can accomplish when its structures are organized in novel ways. ( http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/conditions/05/07/miraculous.memory/index.html ). Breaking the communications barrier for autistic brains will bring happiness and purpose to imprisoned personalities. Every technology designed to make life indistinguishable from normal for the disabled can be adapted to enhance the abilities of the able bodied. For example scientists pushing themselves harder to be smarter are now major consumers of ritalan a drug popularized for hyperactive kids. http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2006/07/07/heinbaugh.blind.reader.affl , http://www.knfbreader.com/ document the dividend digital technology is now able to provide to blind persons. Disabled persons at this stage of technology might resemble movie cyborgs because the mechanical and electronic devices are clunky; but they do work. Raymond Kurzweil's "universal language translator" device and software and ( http://www.physorg.com/news130152277.html ) a baseball cap wired to allow EEG to control household electronics devices , for physically disabled individuals, for home care for the elderly, medical monitoring, and exercise training are disjoint technologies that are breaking new ground ( http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2008/matsuoka) . Oscar Pisorius ( http://womensbioethics.blogspot.com/2008/05/bionic-athletes-stepping-out-of-debate.html ) made able bodied athletes feel disadvantaged, like he did before his new legs. (http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/cascio20080504/ ). One may think of disability as a critical catastrophic fault supported by long creeping degenerative processes. http://www.gsexperience.com/gseblog.html and http://www.gsexperience.com/archive/index.html describe a potential mechanism for a systemic disease (spalting) which may develop in humans who survive well beyond what we consider old and pose monumental new health challenges. Fortunately large scale Anti-Aging Research funders are popping up in every country. Example ( http://www.bg-rf.org.uk/ ) The Biogerontology Research Foundation (BGRF) understands that the current scientific understanding of the ageing process is not yet sufficiently exploited to produce effective commercial medical interventions. BGRF funded research is building on the body of knowledge about how ageing happens, and develop biotechnological interventions to prevent or remediate the molecular and cellular deficits which accumulate with age and which underlie the ill-health of old age. Addressing ageing damage at this most fundamental level provides an important opportunity to produce the effective, lasting treatments for the diseases and disabilities of ageing that are required to improve quality of life in the elderly. BDRF addresses both the symptoms of age-related diseases and the mechanisms of those diseases. USA Lawmakers may 07, 2008 introduced legislation designed to speed the development of new, safer therapies for brain and nervous system disorders and injuries, which affect an estimated 100 million Americans and costs an estimated $1.3 trillion annually to treat. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=legislation-introduced-to According to http://www.Chronicdiseaseimpact.comforward planning to eliminate future disability can have a significant payback. The difference in 2050 USA GDP for eliminating disability at all ages is projected to be 5.668 Trillion (17.6% of 2050 GDP) per annum. Biomarkers may soon predict disabling diseases like alzheimers before even the sufferer is aware of it. http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/20783/?nlid=1079&a=f Raymond Kurzweil ( http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=1 )views the body as a complex software program coded as DNA.. It's the millions of feedback loops from all the subroutines and derivative epigenetic material that make us what we are as much as the mere 100K "Kernel" of "source code " within our genes Ray believes that the convergence of nano-cognitive biological-information (NCBI) technology into a new "singularity" technology and its commercialization is about 10-20 years away. Feb 21, 1963 John F. Kennedy said "It is not enough for a great nation to have added new years to life. Our objective must also be to add new life to those years". To put myself at risk of being partisan , we need to repeat the pledge to "put a man on the moon before the end of the decade" in the form of a new pledge " to end physical and mental disability for the average global citizen before 2025". Governments around the world must put pro-life ahead of pro-death and lead by consorting with technologists and futurists and not by fashioning "Garbage in , garbage out" health policy created and implemented by permission from "Idiot-Savant" pollsters and "spin doctors". Don't laugh that's how it works. Harrison Ford at the end of Indiana Jones saga (4) says "A prize greater than a city of Gold is knowledge". As we prevent disability we enhance the wisdom of old age to become a true asset. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/health/research/20brai.html?_r=1&oref=slogin < http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/health/research/20brai.html?_r=1&oref=slogin > . You may send your feedback attention "Pharmer Mo" at extropian.pharmer at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20080611/dd98ebb4/attachment.html ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ 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 57, Issue 8 ******************************************* -- LIFESPAN PHARMA Inc. Extropian Agroforestry Ventures Inc. 306-447-4944 701-240-9411 Mission: To Preserve, Protect and Enhance Lifespan Plant-based Natural-health Bio-product Bio-pharmaceuticals http://www.angelfire.com/on4/extropian-lifespan http://www.4XtraLifespans.bravehost.com megao at sasktel.net, arla_j at hotmail.com, mfj.eav at gmail.com extropian.pharmer at gmail.com Transhumanism ..."The most dangerous idea on earth" -Francis Fukuyama, June 2005 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Wed Jun 11 23:56:53 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:56:53 -0500 Subject: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" In-Reply-To: References: <470a3c520806110654h43dbe00cm6c0c6ede7dc9bff0@mail.gmail.com> <014c01c8cc15$5cf3f310$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080611185017.023e81f0@satx.rr.com> At 11:26 PM 6/11/2008 +0000, BillK wrote: >If nobody ever died, and life just goes on with no end, then there is >less pressure to do stuff. They can always do it next year if they >want to. How do you know this? From all those sad cases of bone-idle immortals in our midst from prehistory? I can assure you that I feel a damned sight less pressure to do stuff now that my body and brain are breaking down, and knowing that I'll be dead meat in the next 5, 10 or 20 years--and if it's 20 years, I'll probably be brain-dead meat anyway. That foul prospect corrodes me, comrade, it does nothing to concentrate my mind wonderfully. Damien Broderick From mfj.eav at gmail.com Wed Jun 11 23:57:54 2008 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:57:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] longevity-dividend- extropy-chat Digest, Vol 57, Issue 3 Message-ID: <61c8738e0806111657l6586aebej3c7d71cf51f29fef@mail.gmail.com> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Date: Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 8:25 AM Subject: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 57, Issue 3 To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Send extropy-chat mailing list submissions to extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to extropy-chat-request at lists.extropy.org You can reach the person managing the list at extropy-chat-owner at lists.extropy.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of extropy-chat digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: Software advice please (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) 2. ExtroBritannia's June event: Technology risks and the survival of humanity (estropico) 3. Thoughtware.TV: Technological Memes (Andres Colon) 4. Technology advances replicators (Keith Henson) 5. Re: [extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings (scerir) 6. The New Milky Way (Damien Broderick) 7. Air-powered cars (artillo at comcast.net) 8. dark matter (and -- shhhh! -- the F**** p-dox) (Jeff Davis) 9. Cruisin' New Horizons (Amara Graps) 10. Re: Air-powered cars (spike) 11. Re: Air-powered cars (Keith Henson) 12. Re: Cruisin' New Horizons (Kevin H) 13. Re: Air-powered cars (Kevin H) 14. Conference Report: The Future of Religions - Religions of the Future - Second Life, June 4, 5 (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) 15. longevity dividend course OP-ED assignment 01 (Morris Johnson) 16. Longevity Dividend Course OP-ED Assignment 02 (Morris Johnson) 17. Longevity Dividend Course OP-ED Assignment 03 (Morris Johnson) 18. Longevity Dividend Course OP-ED Assignment 04 (Morris Johnson) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2008 20:15:36 +0200 From: "Giu1i0 Pri5c0" Subject: Re: [ExI] Software advice please To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <470a3c520806031115x630ce23dw1880b700fa2b025d at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 6:50 PM, Kevin Freels wrote: > > You may want to also look into building a Joomla website and use a forum > module. There's a steep learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, > it's a nice way to be able to manage content. Best of all, it's free and > open source. www.joomla.org Joomla is nice and reasonably easy to install and use. I still prefer Expression Engine, it comes with blogging and forum modules and many other things. Mediawiki is also easy to install and use. G. ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2008 01:56:47 +0100 From: estropico Subject: [ExI] ExtroBritannia's June event: Technology risks and the survival of humanity To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Message-ID: <4eaaa0d90806031756y11a347efr2be26aded3817688 at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252 Technology risks and the survival of humanity: Is emerging technology more likely to destroy human civilisation or to radically enhance it? The next ExtroBritannia event is scheduled for Saturday the 14th of June 2008, 2pm-4pm. Venue: Room 539 (fifth floor), Birkbeck College, Torrington Square, London WC1E 7HX. The event is free and everyone's welcome. This meeting previews and summarises some of the discussions that will be taking place in July at the (four day long) conference "Global Catastrophic Risks" that will be taking place in Oxford in July (http://www.global-catastrophic-risks.com/) This is arguably the single most important topic that can ever be discussed! Risks worthy of review include: *) Runaway greenhouse effects and other drastic climate change - vs possible geo-engineering solutions and new, cleaner, sources of energy *) Nuclear wars provoked by catastrophic nuclear terrorism *) Supervolcanoes - potentially tamed by future super-strong nanomaterials *) A global pandemic of some horrible new disease *) Hazards from comets and asteroids *) The emergence of malevolent super-AI - vs the chance that super-AI will allow us to find better solutions to our existential risks Speakers who will lead the discussion include: Julian Snape - looking at technology risks and solutions from the point of view of both nanotechnology and possible collisions from NEOs (Near Earth Objects - comets and asteroids) John Dinsdale - looking at technology risks and solutions around Global Warming, Peak Energy (fossil fuel,nuclear) and EROEI (energy return on energy invested) Join the debate! Venue: Birkbeck College - Room 539, 5th floor, Main Building, Torrington Square (which is a pedestrian-only square), London WC1E 7HX ? MAP: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/maps The nearest tube station is Russell Square. Come out of the tube station and turn left, to walk west along Bernard St. Cross over Herbrand St then Woburn Place and keep walking westwards, on the north side of the square. Cross Bedford Way, and turn right into Thornhaugh St, then immediately left to enter Torrington Square through the pedestrian-only courtyard outside SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies). Veer right and you'll see the main entrance to Birkbeck College on the left as you walk up Torrington Square. Take the lift to the 5th floor and follow the signs to room 539. Discussion is likely to continue after the event in a nearby pub, for those who are able to stay. There's also the option of joining some of the UKTA regulars for drinks/lunch beforehand, starting c. 12.30, in "The Friend At Hand" pub which is situated behind Russell Square tube station on Herbrand Street. If it's your first ExtroBritannia look out for a copy of Ending Aging on display on our table. Keep an eye on our mailing list and blog for updates: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extrobritannia/ http://extrobritannia.blogspot.com/ Cheers, Fabio ------------------------------ Message: 3 Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2008 23:03:19 -0400 From: "Andres Colon" Subject: [ExI] Thoughtware.TV: Technological Memes To: singularity at v2.listbox.com, "World Transhumanist Association Discussion List" , "ExI chat list" Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" I have to recommend you to watch this talk by Susan Blackmore, on the subject of Memes and "temes". http://www.thoughtware.tv/videos/watch/2191 "Psychologist/memeticist Susan Blackmore proposes that there's a new layer of "selfish", evolving replicators in the making: just like cognitive replicators (memes) came into existence at some point during genetic evolution, relying on the genetic layer for their continued existence/replication but also controlling it to a certain degree, now 'temes' (technological replicators) are emerging as a product of genetic-memetic evolution, to rely on both genes and memes for their survival/replication, while becoming more and more able to also exert control over both these layers." This kind contribution was added by Donjoe, community member at Thoughtware.TV Andres, President of Thoughtware.TV -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20080603/9f245f2c/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 4 Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2008 18:27:44 -0700 From: "Keith Henson" Subject: [ExI] Technology advances replicators To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=5935.php ======================================= Posted: June 3, 2008 Prototype of machine that copies itself goes on show (*Nanowerk News*) Granted, this is not nanotechnology yet, but quite an interesting development nevertheless: A University of Bath academic, who oversees a global effort to develop an open-source machine that 'prints' three-dimensional objects, is celebrating after the prototype machine succeeded in making a set of its own printed parts. The machine, named RepRap , will be exhibited publicly at the Cheltenham Science Festival (June 4-8, 2008). RepRap is short for replicating rapid-prototyper; it employs a technique called 'additive fabrication'. The machine works a bit like a printer, but, rather than squirting ink onto paper, it puts down thin layers of molten plastic which solidify. These layers are built up to make useful 3D objects. [image: RepRap] RepRap has, so far, been capable of making everyday plastic goods such as door handles,sandals and coat hooks. Now, the machine has also succeeded in copying all its own 3D-printed parts. These parts have been printed and assembled by RepRap team member, Vik Olliver, in Auckland, New Zealand, into a new RepRap machine that can replicate the same set of parts for yet another RepRap machine and so on ad infinitum. While 3D printers have been available commercially for about 25 years, RepRap is the first that can essentially print itself. The RepRap research and development project was conceived, and is directed, by Dr Adrian Bowyer, a senior lecturer in engineering in the Faculty of Engineering & Design at the University of Bath, UK. Dr Bowyer said that: "These days, most people in the developed world run a professional-quality print works, photographic lab and CD-pressing plant in their own house, all courtesy of their home PC. Why shouldn't they also run their own desktop factory capable of making many of the things they presently buy in shops, too? "The possibilities are endless. Now, people can make exactly what they want. If the design of an existing object does not quite suit their needs, they can easily redesign it on their PC and print that out, instead of making do with a mass-produced second-best design from the shops. They can also print out extra RepRap printers to give to their friends. Then those friends can make what they want too." R ecently, Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager at Google Inc, encouraged people to: "Think of RepRap as a China on your desktop." Sir James Dyson, Chief Executive of the Dyson Group, said: "RepRap is a different, revolutionary way of approaching invention. It could allow people to change the ergonomics of a design to their own specific needs." Dr Bowyer hopes people will come to the Cheltenham Science Festival and see both the 'parent' and the 'child' RepRap machines in action for the first time together. "RepRap is the most enjoyable research project I've ever run," he said. "Without the many talented and selfless volunteers the RepRap project has all round the world, it would have never succeeded so quickly." Complete plans for the prototype RepRap 3D printer and detailed tutorials to aid motivated amateurs (and professionals) in assembling one are available, free-of-charge, at the RepRap website (details below). The materials, plus the minority of parts that the machine cannot print, cost about ?300. All those non-printed parts can be bought at hardware shops or from online stores. Dr Bowyer and several of the other Reprap team members will be available to answer questions and exhibit the parent and child RepRap printers in operation at the Cheltenham Science Festival from June 4-8, 2008. Source: *University of Bath* ------------------------------ Message: 5 Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 16:18:09 +0200 From: "scerir" Subject: Re: [ExI] [extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <003201c8c716$fcdd2b20$4ee51e97 at archimede> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Cold fusion seems to be a real "effect". But the question is: whatever the (unknown) reaction [1], is there a measurable *excess* energy? To my knowledge [2], this measurement (heat, radiation, etc.) isn't easy at all. [1] There is a number of previously unknown reactions, in that field, in example see: http://www.aip.org/pnu/2008/split/865-2.html [2] Somebody pointed out the same thing here (scroll down) if I remember well http://www.physorg.com/news131101595.html ------------------------------ Message: 6 Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:55:58 -0500 From: Damien Broderick Subject: [ExI] The New Milky Way To: "'ExI chat list'" Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080605124912.0240b848 at satx.rr.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed from the blog of Adam Crowl, astronomer: The New Milky Way June 4th, 2008 The latest view of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, can be found at the Spitzer Infra-Red Space Telescope?s newspages here? < http://gallery.spitzer.caltech.edu/Imagegallery/image.php?image_name=ssc2008-10b >The New Galaxy ?seems we?re now officially a few galactic arms short - two arms based on old hydrogen-based maps aren?t evidenced by actual star-counts and thus were an artefact of the limitations of hydrogen-based radio astronomy. The Galaxy is still a BIG place, but it looks more like a pretty barred spiral galaxy than a relatively dull ?grand-design? flocculent spiral like it did in the old maps. But why are spiral arms the way they are? It?s a puzzle, but one astrophysicists have no end of good ideas about - and then along come some new surprises, like this one? Black Hole Mass determines tightness of the Spiral ?seems the heftier the central Black Hole, the tighter the spiral arms. In our Local Group there are three big Spirals - ours, M31 (in Andromeda) and M33 (in Triangulum) - and the central Black Hole masses 4 million Solar masses (for the Milky Way), 180 million for M31, and just 1,500 for M33. M33 is a pretty loose spiral, though pretty. Andromeda?s M31 is tightly wound, from what we can see as M31 is tilted away from us. SO the Milky Way is somewhere between the two. But why the correlation? Dark Matter? Weird gravity lanes? Something in hyperspace? Who knows? And that?s why astronomy is both fun and worth doing? ------------------------------ Message: 7 Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:10:50 +0000 From: artillo at comcast.net Subject: [ExI] Air-powered cars To: ExI chat list Message-ID: < 060520081810.11208.48482C2A000EA52700002BC82206999735010404079B9D0E at comcast.net > Strangely enough, this is the first I've heard of this: http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1260/ what a shame we in the USA have to wait for such a thing to come around. Seems like a really simple idea, maybe I'll build one myself LOL ------------------------------ Message: 8 Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 15:21:13 -0700 From: "Jeff Davis" Subject: [ExI] dark matter (and -- shhhh! -- the F**** p-dox) To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Here's the deal. The talk about dark matter uses terms like "non-baryonic", and otherwise asserts that dark matter is distinctly different from regular matter. But I have yet to find any evidence for the it-ain't-regular-matter presumption. The entire case, as far as I have been able to determine, comes from the fact that the "matter" in question is "dark". That, unlike "regular" matter, it can't be seen; that it doesn't emit any light or other EM; that it doesn't do what "regular" matter does, ie form cosmic dust clouds, stars, planets, galaxies, etc. The only actual, substantive, tangible thing that it does -- and which is the totality of evidence (that I have been able to find) establishing it's existence -- is its gravitational effect. And as far as I can tell, this is just, well.., you know, "regular" gravity. Not some special sort of dark matter gravity. So what's up? Did I miss something? Do any of youse guys know something more about this "dark stuff" -- other than that its dark? Something that would rise to the level of actual evidence that "dark matter" is not just regular matter that is well, you know,... dark? [Shhhhhh. Avert you eye's. Scroll past this next bit real quick like. Don't read it. And don't say anything if you do.] In discussions of the Fermi paradox Eugen L and John Clark have forcefully taken the position that if technologically adept space-faring civilizations were abundant in the universe, then at least one would have invented Von Neuman probes, and that we would "see" evidence in the form of cosmic engineering. At the same time Robert B., in related discussions re cosmic engineering, ie computronium-mediated matrioshka brains, Dyson spheres, etc, has made the point that, for most efficient energy use, a prime location for such structures would be in the darkness between stars. There, the outermost of the nested shells --each shell harvests the "waste" energy radiated from the inner adjacent shell -- that last, outermost shell dumps its waste heat into the cosmos at a temperature as close as feasible to the cosmic background radiation. Wouldn't such engineered structures, so located, be exceedingly dark? So is it utterly unreasonable to point to the so-called "dark matter", currently calculated to comprise 85-90 percent of the mass of the universe, and say, "There's your engineered universe, guys. Complete with 10-15 percent "green" space."? I don't know. My pre-singularity chimpy brain can't figure it out. I even put on a snazzy white lab coat and stood near an array of brushed-aluminum-fronted lab instruments with digital displays that made little beeping sounds, but it didn't help. Enhance me, please. Best, Jeff Davis Aspiring Transhuman / Delusional Ape (Take your pick) Nicq MacDonald ------------------------------ Message: 9 Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 16:43:58 -0600 From: Amara Graps Subject: [ExI] Cruisin' New Horizons To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org, wta-talk at transhumanism.org Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" In two days, New Horizons passes the orbit of Saturn (~10 AU). As you might recall, it was only the end of February 2007 (that's right, _last_ year), that it passed Jupiter (~5 AU). It's zippin' at 65,803 km/h. Only the two tiny Helios spacecraft (mid-70s 250,000 km/h) breaks the record as the fastest manmade objects ever flown. See the data for New Horizon's trajectory here: http://www.dmuller.net/newhorizons/ Just 2594 days and 17 minutes to Pluto! ;-) Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado ------------------------------ Message: 10 Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 18:01:53 -0700 From: "spike" Subject: Re: [ExI] Air-powered cars To: "'ExI chat list'" Message-ID: <200806060128.m561SXCM027764 at andromeda.ziaspace.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > ... On Behalf Of artillo at comcast.net > Strangely enough, this is the first I've heard of this: > > http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1260/ > > what a shame we in the USA have to wait for such a thing to > come around. > Seems like a really simple idea, maybe I'll build one myself > LOL Do the calcs first Artillo. They say a little more than one horsepower, then make the absurd claim of 70 mph for 120 miles. I can *guarantee you* those numbers are wrong. Perhaps they dropped a decimal point twice: I would believe a top speed of 7 miles per hour for 12 miles. Whenever one looks at the alternative means of hauling apes, one always comes away with a new respect for good old gasoline. spike ------------------------------ Message: 11 Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 19:22:46 -0700 From: "Keith Henson" Subject: Re: [ExI] Air-powered cars To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On 6/5/08, spike wrote: snip > > Whenever one looks at the alternative means of hauling apes, one always > comes away with a new respect for good old gasoline. Indeed. So what do we need for carbon neutral synthetic gasoline? At a recent conference a guy had worked out the numbers to suck carbon dioxide out of the air and combine it with hydrogen in a reverse combustion industrial operation. He got 79kWh/gallon. I have confidence in that number because the energy in a gallon of gasoline is about 38 kWh and this number is close to twice that. So if you want gasoline for about a dollar a gallon, you can do it on a megascale if you can get massive power in the penny or sub penny per kWh. If you assume 2kg/kW power sats and work the numbers backwards from penny a kWh, you can afford about $75/kg for the lift cost to GEO. That's easy with a space elevator, which takes about 15 cents of electricity and (if it cost $100 billion) a capital charge of $12.50/kg for an 800,000 ton per year delivery model. Reuseable heavy lift launch vehicles will do that for an incremental cost of about $300 a kg split between $1.5 billion for the rocket and $1.5 billion for operations. In 100 flights, a single rocket delievers 10,000 tons to GEO. ($3 billion/0.01 B kg) I have a proposal out to reduce this cost to at least 1/3 and perhaps 1/6. I don't want to make it public just yet, but if you feel up to checking assumptions and my math, ask and I will send you a copy. Keith Henson ------------------------------ Message: 12 Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 20:59:27 -0700 From: "Kevin H" Subject: Re: [ExI] Cruisin' New Horizons To: "ExI chat list" Cc: wta-talk at transhumanism.org Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 3:43 PM, Amara Graps wrote: > > In two days, New Horizons passes the orbit of Saturn (~10 AU). As you > might recall, it was only the end of February 2007 (that's right, _last_ > year), that it passed Jupiter (~5 AU). It's zippin' at 65,803 km/h. Only > the two tiny Helios spacecraft (mid-70s 250,000 km/h) breaks the record > as the fastest manmade objects ever flown. > > See the data for New Horizon's trajectory here: > http://www.dmuller.net/newhorizons/ > > Just 2594 days and 17 minutes to Pluto! ;-) > > Amara Cool site, Amara. I used to track New Horizons on the NASA page ( http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/mission/whereis_nh.php) but then I got out of the habit for some reason. But, I definitely think it is a cool program and at last we'll see the last former planet up close, and I won't even have to wait until I'm thawed out from my cryogenic slumber :) Kevin -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20080605/50fe0d52/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 13 Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 21:23:41 -0700 From: "Kevin H" Subject: Re: [ExI] Air-powered cars To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 7:22 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > On 6/5/08, spike wrote: > > snip > > > > Whenever one looks at the alternative means of hauling apes, one always > > comes away with a new respect for good old gasoline. > > Indeed. > > So what do we need for carbon neutral synthetic gasoline? > > At a recent conference a guy had worked out the numbers to suck carbon > dioxide out of the air and combine it with hydrogen in a reverse > combustion industrial operation. That's an interesting idea, but how exactly is this done? But I agree with the premise: gasoline is far more energy dense than electric batteries will ever be. This really hit home when I was reading about the proposed specs of the upcoming Chevrolet Volt. It's 16 kWh battery, when fully charged, gives it a 40 mile range. But it has a gasoline "range extender" that does nothing but recharge the battery, attaining a range of 640 miles. It's an excellent step, I think, which is what is going to be needed in an energy-scarce world, so that people can choose which way they want to fuel their cars based on existing prices. Right now, electricity is cheaper than gasoline per mile, but with a large number of electric vehicles on the road the price of electricity might go up. Ah well, no such thing as a free lunch. Kevin -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20080605/c5085665/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 14 Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 11:18:07 +0200 From: "Giu1i0 Pri5c0" Subject: [ExI] Conference Report: The Future of Religions - Religions of the Future - Second Life, June 4, 5 To: "ExI chat list" , "World Transhumanist Association Discussion List" , universalimmortalism at yahoogroups.com, sl-transhumanists at googlegroups.com, Hplus2 at yahoogroups.com, transumanisti at yahoogroups.com, extrobritannia at yahoogroups.com, sl4 at sl4.org Message-ID: <470a3c520806060218o3307d81me03160e1202aa4a6 at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Conference Report: The Future of Religions - Religions of the Future - Second Life, June 4, 5 http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/conference_report_the_future_of_religions_religions_of_the_future_second_li/ Full text of my talk with SL chatlog http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/my_talk_at_the_conference_the_future_of_religions_religions_of_the_future/ ------------------------------ Message: 15 Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 08:19:22 -0700 From: "Morris Johnson" Subject: [ExI] longevity dividend course OP-ED assignment 01 To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <61c8738e0806060819o663fe396xe335aedf2b417fb7 at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" LIVING HEALTHIER AND LONGER Hey Kids , are you ready for anti-aging / regenerative medicine? "Get real Dad, be serious, act your age, get over your midlife crisis , there is no such as anti-aging medicine , you are going to die sooner than you think so quit wasting your time and focus on making your last years as comfortable as possible" has been a typical response. I respond "ANTI-AGING MEDICINE really exists and the market for doctors who open anti-aging medical spas is currently 50 billion dollars per year with each patient worth 4-20,000 dollars per year in products and services. " Recent episodes of "60 minutes, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and a Barbara Walters ABC Special on longevity" report that a certain Dr. Aubrey DeGrey is to this new frontier what David Suzuki and Al Gore are to environmentalism. The "Inconvenient Truth" is that the super wealthy are already the first customers, the investors and the owners and promoters of this entirely new form of medicine. Billions of real money are already committed to commercial products under development. What we are talking about is a medicine not just designed to rescue you from cancer, heart disease or degenerative conditions after they are diagnosed but a whole new system of medical care designed to prevent disease years or even decades before it might happen. Not everyone is convinced that even the garden variety anti-aging ideas are safe. Some recent headlines read.. "Antioxidant Vitamin E supplements may be deadly" and "Don't bank on anti-aging pills anytime soon - unless you're a worm" Some feel we have no business even poking around and tinkering with mother nature's secrets. Potential therapies have had a rough start here in the west but have taken root elsewhere. When stem cell technologies were banned in western countries, Chinese students just packed up their lap-tops and headed home to apply this new knowledge to a more receptive audience. This is how a cancer treatment called Gendicine originated. We in North America have a regulatory system that does not allow individual risk takers to move so rapidly to commercialize new medical technology. If computers and software had been regulated like medicine we would still be using Commadore 64's and playing Pong. Unwillingness to take risks drastically reduces the possibility of benefit. According to Dr. S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois a "longevity dividend" of lower health care costs, increased savings and worker productivity would result from a modest deceleration in the rate of aging by about seven years, and adequate funding could produce "dramatic advances in preventive medicine and public health within the next few decades." I am Morris Johnson . At age 52 , after spending 35 years reading scientific medical research journals I do not just follow fads . I am neither an uncritical enthusiast nor an uninformed skeptic. I personally venture out within the bounds of my personal means to use the best science the world has to offer in attempt to catch and surf the longevity wave and secure for myself a personal longevity dividend. I have designed and do follow my own personalized healthy lifespan management program. Is the science real or bogus. As I write this I have just begun a 10 week course to study this thing called the "longevity Dividend". Tomorrow I will attend a conference entitled "Improving Human Health 2 ? Metabolic Syndrome". Let me be your guide to take the mystery out of the term "Longevity Dividend" and lets explore together the promises and risks for not just baby boomers and their children but society as a whole. For example, how might longer healthier lives affect the economics of pensions, jobs and family relationships and medical care Systems. This 10 part series will bring you my findings , pose questions and perhaps add an opinion or two, if space permits. You may send your feedback "attention Pharmer Mo" at extropian.pharmer at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20080606/2a039832/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 16 Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 08:21:58 -0700 From: "Morris Johnson" Subject: [ExI] Longevity Dividend Course OP-ED Assignment 02 To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <61c8738e0806060821h4af07989ha009be78a44a0b58 at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" 02-Healthy Demographics To accept "groundhog day" and succumb to death at the statistically predicted age of 85 or to defy statistics to keep motoring on , that is the question; whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of social persecution for daring to hope to be able to flaunt youthful beauty at 113?.or by taking up arms against aging to transform it into "steady-state self-directed long-term self-improvement project". "Holy purple shades of Hamlet's ghost Dad" respond my kids. "Are you going to make us listen to the statistics and demographics of how all you baby boomers with your funky old man diseases want to flush away your 53 trillion or so dollars of pension fund money and enslave our kids to satisfy your vain attempt to perpetuate your denial of the inevitability of your certain and timely death? " "Yes", I respond "this family conference is about the demographics of aging". WE ARE THE GENERATION OF OLD PEOPLE WHO WILL RULE THE 21ST CENTURY, according to Ken Dychtwald Ph.D. in AGE POWER. We have a responsibility to learn how to use our power wisely! Once we lived in fear of global starvation from uncontrollable population growth. Now China, Europe, Eastern Europe and Australia are all racing towards zero population growth as they reduce infant mortality, infectious disease and use planned parenthood. People only reduce family size after the threat of disease , malnutrition and racial conflict diminishes. A new challenge to a healthy lifespan, Metabolic Syndrome, has become an epidemic with over 25% of North Americans affected. "Improving Human Health-08" presenters define it as systemic insulin resistance resulting from a combination of (even modest ) obesity ("toxic waist ") , chronic silent inflammation, high triglycerides, high blood pressure, and impaired glucose tolerance. Good genes or regular physical activity can mask it but diabetes, atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease, stroke and cancer are its ultimate consequences. High risk groups include aboriginals whose genetics were never designed to cope with the rapidly digested carbohydrates of a supersized "McDiet". Metabolic syndrome develops most rapidly in people with depression, lack of self asteem, or a feeling of lack of control over personal circumstances. Young adults whose lifestyle also includes smoking, drinking, risky recreational drug combinations , a poor quality diet, and sedentary lives may be the first generation since 1850 to reverse the trend towards increased longevity. Researchers suggest the "Mediterranean food pyramid", regular exercise, low glycemic index (slowly digestible) carbohydrates and certain foods and nutritional supplements as countermeasures ( http://www.machineslikeus.com/cms/news/the-secret-long-life-may-not-be-genes ). What really drives healthy longevity gains is education and disposable income in that order. Educated affluent boomers seek out solutions without regard to cost while a disproportionate number of the lower socioeconomic groups , unsure of a solution do nothing . Ironically, those with less ability to buy into the new health technologies are also destined to have to remain healthy enough to become the caregiver population for the affluent boomers. Statistics show we are living longer at the average rate of 2.5 years every decade and this longevity gain is accelerating despite the growing gap between subpopulations. The gap between Healthspan (healthy vibrant productive lifespan) and total lifespan will replace poverty as the scourge of the 21st century (http://www.alternet.org/story/84396/). We must remain healthy, active and part of society and like the "one hoss shea" only fall apart the very instant before death. Failure to do this means physically and mentally frail elderly boomers will be 35-70% of the population in 2050. This will be an absolutely intolerable "dependency ratio" for the young to bear. Suppose if you will, that problem and solution to this "historically insoluble enigma" are one and the same. Pensioners and pension fund owners have 53 trillion reasons to replace palliative medicine with regenerative medicine. A world that can spend trillions on old-fashioned wars can just as easily spend trillions in a "War against Aging". Imagine if a war on premature death could produce extended longevity. Just as the computers of 2008 would have been magic in 1908, the medicine of 2108 after the "War against Aging" has nearly a century under its belt may be nothing short of a magic show. Can we "bootstrap it" with what we know today well enough to make it to that show regenerated instead of frail. Every war has to have a "flashpoint" to start. Fortunately, a "War for Healthy Longevity" can ignite from any of 7 scientifically accepted Pandora's "tinder" boxes. In part 3 I will detail what we think we know that can be used to make our healthspan equal to our lifespan. You may send your feedback attention "Pharmer Mo" at extropian.pharmer at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20080606/7a9e9efe/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 17 Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 08:23:59 -0700 From: "Morris Johnson" Subject: [ExI] Longevity Dividend Course OP-ED Assignment 03 To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <61c8738e0806060823i20c2d215j2ef650ef76861817 at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" 03-Healthy Biology All living things have metabolism, metabolism continually causes damage , damage eventually causes pathology , pathology is disease, and leads to aging then death. Mother nature made biology so complicated so every generation would have no choice but to grow up, reproduce, nurture offspring and then get dead as fast as possible to make room for the next go round. "You know what dad, We think there's hope for you yet. Let's see you weasel out of this one". "To do justice to the topic this time, the kids are going to see dad sweat , by golly", says I. Metabolism is the incredibly complex network of molecular and cellular processes that keep us alive. Gerontologists study metabolism. Pathology is the network of molecular processes that kill us. Geriatricians study disease pathology. A whole new breed of anti-aging specialists study and treat the missing link, damage. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23358964/ documents how some simple regenerative measures are now part of integrative (combining of all possible options into a carefully planned package) medicine. You can turn an old car into a vintage classic car by assessing the condition then systematically repairing the old damage , then continue watching for new damage and fix that too. Why can't you do the same with people? That's the "engineering approach" proposed by Dr Aubrey de Grey, founder of the Methusalah Foundation., Cambridge , UK. He has raised 10 million dollars of funding in the last 2 years and awards funding for research towards creating a replicatable animal model, the Rejuvenated Robust "Methusalah" Mouse (MM). Simply put take a mouse as old as a 55 year old human (in mouse years) and give it 3 times its remaining life expectancy , all in good health.. If you use these same age retarding techniques on people you should halve the rate of damage and add 30 extra healthy years to the 30 expected for a 55 year old and raise total healthspan by 20% overall. Aubrey sees damage repair as the critical control points that reduce the metabolic hazards to an acceptable level and manage the risk of diminished quality of the finished product, lifespan.. Aubrey has segmented the damage into 7 categories: junk inside cells, junk outside cells, too few cells, too many cells, chromosome mutations, mitochondria (energy producing intracellular organelles) mutations and protein crosslinks. For each category there is a proposed repair strategy. The sum of these strategies is termed "engineered negligible senescence" (SENS)[ http://richardjschueler.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=56847 ] . Later in this series I will discuss the safety and efficacy of specific current therapies as they relate to the "seven deadly sins of metabolism". These interventions are at various stages of research, development and clinical and every day commercial application. Aubrey states that you don't have to repair all the damage at once. If you start at the "biological age" of 55 and select the most critical areas and fix HALF THE DAMAGE you should double the total healthspan and raise the remaining healthspan 5 times. The goal for a commercial regenerative medicine industry would be to reduce the remaining damage each time therapy is undertaken and implement increasingly more effective repair. Eventually repair happens faster than new damage occurs. FYI-Watch the BBC TV series " How to Build a Human 4of4 - Forever Young (60 minutes) 1/6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7ZAhdSidzk 2/6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=necHabLN37Q 3/6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cAIPTPIL7A 4/6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qqoT1oCEBI 5/6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LObrLpV8ric 6/6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkf23Nn9qX0 Aubrey has coined the term "Longevity Escape Velocity" as the rate at which rejuvenation therapies must improve in order to hope to outpace the accumulation of damage they cannot currently fully repair. Compare this to manned flight, an insoluble problem since the dawn of civilization until 1903. Once the Wright Brothers made the first proven flight, everything was copied and improved upon until today we can fly just about anything anywhere. For a sneak peek into the future see : http://transcurve.net/blog/aaron/10-reasons-you-will-live-to-1000. My next piece will detail the issues surrounding the bioethics debate about purposefully increasing healthy longevity. You may send your feedback attention "Pharmer Mo" at extropian.pharmer at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20080606/11fbbddf/attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ Message: 18 Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 08:25:18 -0700 From: "Morris Johnson" Subject: [ExI] Longevity Dividend Course OP-ED Assignment 04 To: "ExI chat list" Message-ID: <61c8738e0806060825ga1e0ff8habbf243ecdc43618 at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" 04-Healthy Ethics "Trust me we know what's good for you dad and we'll always do the (ethical) right thing". I know you mean well, but if what you deem ethical and right for me is blocked by legislation or regulation; will you let me die? The Readers" Digest thesaurus of synonyms calls moral, decent, virtuous, upright, proper, fitting, correct, just, fair, aboveboard and kosher "ethical" and underhanded, shady, improper, unfair, lowdown, nefarious, unbecoming, unseemly, indecorous, immoral and indecent "unethical. " Ethics are not fixed and can be skewed by "moral hazard", the punishment we get or cause for doing good deeds. Moral hazard occurs when there are more beneficiaries to death than life. The value of a "Quality Adjusted Life Year" (QALY)[mathematically derived value of a year of perfect health] for a patient determines if an HMO or public payor will contribute and how much towards a medical good or service. For example a simple vaccination for HPV when allowed under medicare can have a $100,000 /QALY value if it is deemed that the population based average risk of death from cervical cancer is too low. Then a "sensitivity analysis" can be done and criteria which modify the accessibility are developed so that the adjusted QALY value is reduced to an acceptable number, usually less than $50,000/QALY saved. Ethics of institutionalized Ageism is demonstrated thusly: If a youth dies it's a loss of potentially productive life ; If a frail elderly person dies it's a blessing to see them free of pain and suffering. "Living Wills" are spun to be a way for the frail or terminally ill to relieve health care providers of the need for heroic or long term end of life palliative measures. The moral hazard is that the last year of life is extraordinarily expensive. The payor saves by being able to redistribute the savings to other covered services or shareholders. In 2008 in Saskatchewan when 43.7% of every tax dollar went to healthcare, the average cost of all the health care goods and services was $4,360 per person. Saving $5-30,000 by socially accepted forms of passive euthanasia VS allowing expensive experimental, risky heroic long shot measures which may provide insights into how to better treat the next person show how ethics and moral hazard can collide as an ethical conundrum. Canada's "progressive licencing" for new pharmaceuticals is a step towards managing this hazard. ( http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg19826523.800-canada-to-rele ase-trial-drugs-to-patients.html < http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg19826523.800-canada-to-release-trial-drugs-to-patients.html > ). Our culture does not allow "honor killing" within families or maintaining a one child policy and selecting for that child to be a son by killing newborn girl babies however, a Seattle Washington man ,Timothy Garon, who used State Law approved medical marijuana to ease his pain from advanced hepatitis was knocked him off the elegibility list for a liver transplant and left to die recently. Some say taxpayer paid universal medicare creates an incentive to act irresponsibly because the safety net will catch you. Cost shared coverage of preventative care should yield savings over the total life-cycle of a patient. http://www.fightaging.org/archives/001479.php briefly considers the economic costs Vs benefits of the longevity dividend Let me set out some of the common arguments against enhancing adult longevity as set down by George Dvorsky in his presentation to the "securing the Longevity Dividend" meeting. George states that critics contend that death has value by giving meaning to life, providing for the need for morality, allowing for self-sacrifice, preventing excessive risk aversion, making beauty exist and providing a vital imperfection. Some say that it would be cost prohibitive, people would have unequal access and that distribution would be unfair. Some say the motivations are questionable, are of no known social good, produce anti-social behavior, there are more pressing concerns for society to deal with (global security and geopolitical gamesmanship) and that individual actions are against the collective best interest (http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/anissimov20080513/ ). The wealthiest 1 percent of USA households household income averages 190 times the national average , own 34.3% of the nations wealth and include the Forbes 400 whose 2006 wealth was 1.25 Trillion dollars. This is more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent. Power and money trump ethics so how does the rest of society manage the moral hazard of undeniable access to lifespan enhancing and extending and enhancement therapeutics ( http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/cebys08/ ) for some and QALY limited access for everybody else? My next piece will provide details of life extending therapeutics which have a wide range of accessibility, cost and proof of efficacy. Some have been available for years and some are years from the commercial market. This series was meant to help you plan for the future based by developing your own personal pro-health and longevity strategic action plan. You may send your feedback attention "Pharmer Mo" at extropian.pharmer at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20080606/c59801fe/attachment.html ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ 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 57, Issue 3 ******************************************* -- LIFESPAN PHARMA Inc. Extropian Agroforestry Ventures Inc. 306-447-4944 701-240-9411 Mission: To Preserve, Protect and Enhance Lifespan Plant-based Natural-health Bio-product Bio-pharmaceuticals http://www.angelfire.com/on4/extropian-lifespan http://www.4XtraLifespans.bravehost.com megao at sasktel.net, arla_j at hotmail.com, mfj.eav at gmail.com extropian.pharmer at gmail.com Transhumanism ..."The most dangerous idea on earth" -Francis Fukuyama, June 2005 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Thu Jun 12 02:39:42 2008 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:39:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Audio transcript? MAX MORE in Second Life In-Reply-To: References: <470a3c520806082334q5dda1482v2ef16360b9bd5476@mail.gmail.com> <200806090830.33488.kanzure@gmail.com> Message-ID: <51ce64f10806111939v466a469v40b9795e4f48c5a4@mail.gmail.com> Wow, a lot of people showed up! Maybe 40-50? Dagon, can you upload the voice transcript, or send it to me so I can upload it? Thanks. -- Michael Anissimov Lifeboat Foundation -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Jun 12 03:04:26 2008 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 20:04:26 -0700 Subject: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" In-Reply-To: <014c01c8cc15$5cf3f310$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <200806120331.m5C3V7Sc028695@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > Lee Corbin > ...they could make an equally vacuous argument saying > that *we* were the ones who were victims of Darwinian > brainwashing... Lee I have often wanted to ask a christian religious fundamentalist: when god created all that oil, why do you suppose he put so much of it under the feet of those heathern Arabs? {8^D spike From spike66 at att.net Thu Jun 12 03:24:28 2008 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 20:24:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Tommy Emmanuel In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20080611180758.0244b9e8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <200806120351.m5C3pAPP023749@andromeda.ziaspace.com> ... > Damien Broderick ... > Subject: Re: [ExI] Tommy Emmanuel > > Another fine Australian! :) Whaaaat? Do I detect a hint of national pride? From our own Damien? {8^D Indeed, Tommy Emmanuel does magic on that guitar. Australia and planet earth may unapologetically take pride in him. spike From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Jun 12 00:14:27 2008 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:14:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Ethics] Consequential, deontological, virtue-based, preference-based..., ... In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Jun 7, 2008 at 6:21 AM, Vladimir Nesov wrote: > On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 8:11 PM, Jef Allbright wrote: >> On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 7:09 AM, Vladimir Nesov wrote: >>> >>> Does the main reason you need to include subjectivity in your system >>> come from the requirement to distinguish between different motives for >>> the same action based on agent's states of mind? I don't think it's >>> needed to be done at all (as I'll describe below). Or do you simply >>> mean that the outcome depends on the relation of agent to its >>> environment (not "good", but "good for a particular agent in >>> particular environment")? >> >> It appears we have something of a disconnect here in our use of the >> term "subjective", perhaps reflecting a larger difference in our >> epistemology. First, I'll mention that the term "subjective" often >> evokes a knee-jerk reaction from those who highly value rationality, >> science and objective measures of truth and tend to righteously >> associate any use of the term "subjective" with vague, soft, mystical, >> whishy-washy, feel-good, post-modernist, deconstructionalist, >> non-realist, relativist, etc. thinking. For the record (for the nth >> time) I deplore such modes, and strive for as much precision and >> accuracy as practical (but not more so.) When I refer to something as >> "subjective" I'm referring to the necessarily subjective model through >> which any agent perceives its umwelt within (I must assume) a coherent >> and consistent reality. > > But in many contexts, at least in theoretical discourse, it can be > assumed that the reality is specified down to the quarks, which makes > the difference between subjective look at the facts that follow from > such a description and, as you see it, overzealoous objective view, to > be too close to each other to warrant any distinction. Am I > misundestanding your point again? Even if you insist on "subjective > probabilities", there are things which are too certain for their > potential falsity to influence decision-making, including > epistemology. Vladimir, I assert that any effective model of morality has an intrinsically subjective element. You point out that some contexts are sufficiently well-specified that they are virtually objective. Fine, but so what? Can you provide even a single example of an issue that is both so well-specified as to be considered mutually objective AND which is located on the moral spectrum? Note that "morality" cannot apply to the decision-making of an isolated agent whose choices are just as "right" as they are "good" within the sole context of the agent's own model. Neither does "morality" apply to the hypothetical case of an agent with a god's-eye view of his universe, such that "good" or "right" is indistinguishable from "is". As I have said so many times before, we are like individual leaves on a tree of increasing possibility, which subjective points of view are supported by branches of increasing probability leading to back to "ultimate reality." With increasing context of awareness, we would find necessarily increasing agreement on our increasingly fundamental supporting values (branches) in common. >>> Reductionism isn't supposed to answer such questions, it only suggests >>> that the answer is to be sought for in the causal structure of >>> reality. If you choose to take guidance from your own state of mind, >>> that's one way (but not reliable and impossible to perfect). >> >> Statements such as the above are jarring to me (but overwhelmingly >> common on this discussion list.) Who is the "you" who exists apart >> such that "you" can take guidance from your own state of mind? >> > > You are not singular, you consist of moving parts that interact with each other. I refer to the "you" of agency. You point out that any agent consists of parts. Fine, so what? Did you even ask yourself what my point might have been? >> Yes, I speak repeatedly about the increasing good of increasing >> coherence over increasing context of a model for decision-making >> evolving with interaction with reality. Note that this model is >> necessarily entirely subjective -- the map is never the territory. > > Map is in the territory, so territory that implements map can also be > mapped. Only if from a greater context. > That is how map influences the territory, by being part of it. No. Incoherent. In systems-theoretic terms, i.e. in terms that can be practically modeled, any intentional agent necessarily acts from an internal model to effect change on its local environment. This is in no sense a denial of the agent existing and acting within its environment, but if you're going to talk about "influence", you need to model A influencing B, as A influencing A is incoherent. > A fallacy is in assuming that map is the territory that is being > mapped by it, even if it's not so. But it might be so, sometimes. Probability mass must sum to unity, and while there may be cases where a map might for all practical purposes represent all **presumably** salient aspects of the territory, can't we remain calmly parsimonious here and simply agree that that the map is **never** exactly the territory? >> You may have some difficulty with my statement above, and I'm happy to >> entertain any thoughtful objections, but you may have even more >> difficulty with what I will say next: >> >> The term "increasing context" applies equally well to the accumulating >> experience of a single person or to the accumulating experience of a >> group -- with scope of agency corresponding to the scope of the model. >> In other words, agency entails a self, but in no sense is that agency >> necessarily constrained within the bounds of a single organism. > > No, I actually have no problem with it. My current working hypothesis > for Friendliness is to construct something that is to human > civilization, like a brain is to inborn lower-level drives. I'm talking about an open-ended intentional framework for increasingly effective search for positive-sum solutions promoting an increasing context of increasingly coherent hierarchical fine-grained subjective and evolving values, via methods implementing principles of increasing objective efficacy over increasing scope of consequences. If you would call my envisioned framework a "brain" for the humans it serves, then we might be close to agreement there. But to me it would seem silly to call one's brain "friendly" to its body unless one considered the brain to have independent agency. And to the extent that any such any such asymmetry of intelligence existed, then I think it would be naive to expect that such an agent could possibly be "Friendly" as its values would necessarily be widely divergent and thus inherently in conflict with the other agents. Consider the relationship of human parents to their offspring with widely their divergent values. Protective, caring? Yes, but hardly "friendly." >> So, one might object: "So Jef, you are saying that Hitler's campaign >> to exterminate the Jews should be seen as moral within the subjective >> model that supported such action?" To which I would reply "Yes, but >> only to the extent such model was seen (necessarily from within) to >> increase in coherence AS IT INCREASED IN CONTEXT." Eliminating any >> who object certainly increases coherence, but it does NOT increase in >> context, and thus it tends not to be evolutionarily successful. Cults >> are another fine example of increasing coherence with DECREASING >> context and most certainly not the other way around. > > I'm sure nobody is assuming objective morality. Morality is determined > by properties of an agent, but properties of an agent are determined > by its physical makeup, which you can analyze from outside. How does > your higher cognition know what is good for "you"? Parts of the brain > implementing it observe the inborn drives, or environmental infuence. Therein lies a fundamental and widespread misconception. Evolved organisms are not fitness maximizers, but rather, adaptation executors. The organism exactly expresses its nature within the constraints of its environment. There is no objective good. >>> I didn't imply a guarantee, I deliberately said they only need to be >>> good in "general enough" sense. Do you have a particular model of what >>> constitutes intelligent behavior? >> >> Yes and no. As I see it, the essential difficulty is that the >> "intelligence" of any action is dependent on context, and (within the >> domain of questions we would consider to be of moral interest) we can >> never know the full context within which we act. > > Hence, ability to generalize as an essential feature of intelligence, > if not the only one. Somewhat oxymoronic, when one considers that "to generalize" here entails learning and physically expressing an increasingly complex transform encoding effective interaction with a complex and uncertain environment. "To generalize" here carries virtually no practical information content relative to the actual process, while it claims to be "the only one." Like enthusing that Solomonoff Induction is the key to AI. >> I think it is worthwhile to observe that "intelligent" behavior is >> seen as maximizing intended consequences (while minimizing the >> unintended (and unforeseen)). It is the capacity for effective >> complex prediction within a complex environment. >> >> I think this problem is inherently open-ended and to the extent that >> future states are under-specified, decision-making must depend >> increasingly not on expected utility but on a model representing >> best-known hierarchical principles of effective action (i.e. >> instrumental scientific knowledge) promoting a present model of >> (subjective, evolving) values into the future. >> >> As I said to Max several days ago (Max?) morality does not inhere in >> the agent (who will at any time exactly express its nature) but in the >> outwardly pointing arrow pointing in the direction of the space of >> actions implementing principles effective over increasing scope >> promoting an increasing context of increasingly coherent values. > > You keep repeating these words, and I'm sure you have some intuitive > picture in your mind that is described by them, but it help in > communicating that picture. I don't know any more practical way to effectively expand on this formulation within the constraints of this forum and significant differences in personal background. I've tried. >> You appear to assume the possibility of some Archimedian point outside >> the system (where if you could but stand (given a sufficient lever) >> you could move the world.) My point, is that we are always only >> within the system itself, and thus we can never have a truly objective >> basis for navigating into the future. > > We are always outside the environment, interacting with it, or > half-of-you is always outside the other-half-of-you. I don't see a > problem is assuming an outside view, it is a useful approximation for > reasoning. Therein lies the infinite regress, the singularity of self, at the heart of these many ***interminable*** topics of discussion. >>> I don't like the notion of values very much, it looks like unnatural >>> way of describing things to me. >> >> Yes, "values" are seen as soft, squishy mushy things, the very >> antithesis of hard objective rationality. ;-) >> >> My usage of "values" is not entirely synonymous with "preferences" >> however. I'm using "values" in the broader sense implying the actual >> hard physical nature of the agent, inherently deeper than the >> "preferences" which the agent might be aware of and express. In the >> same sense, I encompass the "values" of a simple thermostat, >> fundamentally no different than the "values" of a person, although >> differing a great deal in scale of complexity. >> > > Values = physical makeup of an agent? At this granularity, I'd say > that environment is also very important in determining the values, at > which point explanation looses meaning, if no specific concept is > presented. Really? Imagine system A and system B operating within effectively the same environment. You can consider A and B to be two persons -- let's make them a human male and female and make one young and the other elderly. [It'd be more fun to use individuals from somewhat more distant branches of the tree of subjective reality I mention earlier, perhaps a dolphin and a machine intelligence, but a male and female human may seem easier.] Now, I'm saying that these individuals leaves -- er, persons -- within that common environment, will have somewhat divergent values entirely as a function of their present physical structure. And what was your point? - Jef From hkhenson at rogers.com Thu Jun 12 05:25:12 2008 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (hkhenson) Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:25:12 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars In-Reply-To: <580930c20806110241r2586b45bie61c2ced6e322588@mail.gmail.co m> References: <060520081810.11208.48482C2A000EA52700002BC82206999735010404079B9D0E@comcast.net> <200806060128.m561SXCM027764@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <1212784802_27098@s8.cableone.net> <006401c8caab$8dac3230$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1213162341_7679@s7.cableone.net> <00f101c8cb87$9901e1c0$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1213171467_6078@s2.cableone.net> <580930c20806110241r2586b45bie61c2ced6e322588@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <1213248469_3106@s2.cableone.net> At 02:41 AM 6/11/2008, Stefano Vaj wrote: snip >Thus, we have to profit more extensively and directly from the very >process that has originally produced "natural" oil and gas, namely >nuclear fusion, be it in artificial reactors It's not entirely obvious that fusion reactors on earth make a lot of sense. They might, but tapping the natural one could be a lot easier. >or by going to space and >getting it from "natural" reactors, i.e., stars. It depends a great deal on how the economy is organized. If everyone uploads and only travels by optical fiber, an energy budged of a hundred watts per person might be plenty. It's a very different situation where people want to eat well and travel long distances. >Then you can have all >the oil and gas you like, but without waiting for the geological ages >natural production involves. Not that you would need much, once the >energy is already there. Assuming things didn't change a lot, about 1/3 of our energy is transport fuels. That's huge, but well within what you can do with power satellites. Keith From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Jun 12 09:26:38 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:26:38 +0200 Subject: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" In-Reply-To: <012e01c8cbc3$4a5a6b00$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <580930c20806110229p36d0067eh3413add4200c0611@mail.gmail.com> <012e01c8cbc3$4a5a6b00$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <580930c20806120226rb652c3u3c63807612fcc47@mail.gmail.com> On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 2:56 PM, Lee Corbin wrote: > Why would one wish to forego reproduction? Besides, this is an > obviously very non-ESS (that is, non Evolutionarily Stable Strategy) > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy > > As we are uploaded (probably), or replaced by mind children, > or expand into space to escape the on-going Singularity in the > solar system, I could not in good conscience recommend to > any group of which I was a part a non-ESS. Very well said, and a point I share completely. >> Then, "probability of death" may depend on factors that remain >> entirely within the scope of human self-determination, and I sincerely >> doubt that its reduction to zero would be an absolute, unconditional >> individual and societal goal. > > Not at all. Huge numbers of science fiction writers, e.g. Egan, Broderick, > Brin, and so on all the way back to Algis Budry's "Rogue Moon" in 1960, > it's been understood that one will of course have "backups" throughout > any region of space in exact analogy to off-site storage of important > computer data. Yes, it came to my mind, Schild's Ladder being even more a case in point than Glory, where they are relatively casual about the loss of one of more "individualities" (the real loss being considered that of experiences and data collected since the last backup) as long as copies are kept somewhere and can restored on the desidered support. OTOH, it might be argued, even though this is in my view a purely nominalistic argument, that the destruction of a given, working copy of your identity would be "death" and that your restored backup would be an identical individual rather than your mythical "self", so that the loss would be prevented for your community and/or the universe, but not really for the "self itself". The real issue, however, is that Egan's virtually "immortal" characters, while being , do accept reasonable risks whenever this is worth doing - or even chose to be terminated, sometimes, as it happens in Diaspora. >> I would be reluctant, say, to forbid sport, including its extreme version, > > You mean, you would be reluctant to get together with your neighbors > and elect a powerful government that would interfere with individual's > decisions concerning things like suicide. Exactly. Or even much lesser risks than those involved in a suicide attempt. :-) Stefano Vaj From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Jun 12 09:32:26 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:32:26 +0200 Subject: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" In-Reply-To: References: <470a3c520806110654h43dbe00cm6c0c6ede7dc9bff0@mail.gmail.com> <014c01c8cc15$5cf3f310$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <580930c20806120232m74381efel5971e573656a32fc@mail.gmail.com> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 1:26 AM, BillK wrote: > If you know that you only have a limited time here, then you have to > consider what you would like to do with that time. There again, "lifetime" has the curious feature of not following the rule according to which abundance of a good leads to a lower values of its unities. For sure being terminally ill or sentenced to death may focus your mind, but in more general terms I would say that we did not start thinking less of what to do with our time when our life expectancy went from 30 years to 90. And unless we are speaking or real, literal eternity, I suspect that 90,000 rather than 90 would not change a thing. Stefano Vaj From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Jun 12 11:45:26 2008 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:45:26 +1000 Subject: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" In-Reply-To: <470a3c520806110654h43dbe00cm6c0c6ede7dc9bff0@mail.gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806110654h43dbe00cm6c0c6ede7dc9bff0@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: 2008/6/11 Giu1i0 Pri5c0 : > This "wicked phrase" is an evident nonsense, and the fact that more > than enough people say it only shows that more than enough people and > more than enough stupid, or clueless victims of religious propaganda. But note that the main selling point of much of this religious propaganda is that the faithful will gain eternal life, which would not be much of a reward if death really was such a good thing. -- Stathis Papaioannou From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Jun 12 13:15:54 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:15:54 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Cost of synfuel was Air-powered cars In-Reply-To: <1213248469_3106@s2.cableone.net> References: <060520081810.11208.48482C2A000EA52700002BC82206999735010404079B9D0E@comcast.net> <1212784802_27098@s8.cableone.net> <006401c8caab$8dac3230$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1213162341_7679@s7.cableone.net> <00f101c8cb87$9901e1c0$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <1213171467_6078@s2.cableone.net> <580930c20806110241r2586b45bie61c2ced6e322588@mail.gmail.com> <1213248469_3106@s2.cableone.net> Message-ID: <580930c20806120615v43523994g878f32f7164f898@mail.gmail.com> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 7:25 AM, hkhenson wrote: > At 02:41 AM 6/11/2008, Stefano Vaj wrote: > It's not entirely obvious that fusion reactors on earth make a lot of > sense. They might, but tapping the natural one could be a lot easier. Mmhhh. In principle, fusion reactors would not be so different from other termoelectrical reactors. Surely some severe inconveniences might come up in the future, but I cannot really imagine why and how they would be worse than those related to the burning of fossil fuels or to nuclear fission. The physical process behind fusion is well understood, and what really remains are AFAIK engineering and implementation problems. The problem with natural reactors is that they are not at hand, and planets, especially those with an atmosphere and a day-night cycle, do not seem the best place to exploit them. Their are instead fine - as BTW artificial reactors would appear to be - in space or in Dyson spheres... > It depends a great deal on how the economy is organized. If everyone > uploads and only travels by optical fiber, an energy budged of a > hundred watts per person might be plenty. It's a very different > situation where people want to eat well and travel long distances. I believe that information and energy are ultimately going to be the only to real, fundamental resources, but I am not sure that you can reduce everything to the first. Whatever energy efficiencies you may achieve, more (exploitable) energy will forever allow you to do more things, all the rest being equal. > Assuming things didn't change a lot, about 1/3 of our energy is > transport fuels. That's huge, but well within what you can do with > power satellites. The beauty of abundant, cheap energy is that it both allows you to synthesise fuels, including very traditional ones, *and* make them much less relevant, since energy may be stored in plenty of other ways.,, Stefano Vaj From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Jun 12 13:29:41 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:29:41 +0200 Subject: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" In-Reply-To: References: <470a3c520806110654h43dbe00cm6c0c6ede7dc9bff0@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <580930c20806120629l632ddc0dq49bc6d6973c5379c@mail.gmail.com> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 1:45 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > 2008/6/11 Giu1i0 Pri5c0 : > But note that the main selling point of much of this religious > propaganda is that the faithful will gain eternal life, which would > not be much of a reward if death really was such a good thing. This sounds as well as a very good argument. I might be influenced by my professional training as a lawyer, but I strongly prefer ad personam rather than ad rem arguments, whenever they are promptly available. Nothing wrong in challenging other people's beliefs, especially when we do not share them, but when somebody's claims are inconsistent in the first place with the said beliefs, all sensible discussions are quickly and elegantly put to rest, rather than ending in opposite emotional rhetorics or, in a best and most honest case scenario, in an agreement to disagree. Accordingly, irrespective of the fact that "death gives meaning to life" is or is not a stupid statement, the most important thing to note, IMHO, is that such statement is strictly irrelevant as a ground for an anti-transhumanist stance. Stefano Vaj From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Jun 12 13:59:31 2008 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:59:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Wrestling with Transhumanism :: Katherine Hayles :: Global Spiral In-Reply-To: <22360fa10806120642v12872db6pe4559f92021c3cf4@mail.gmail.com> References: <22360fa10806120642v12872db6pe4559f92021c3cf4@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Here's an excellent opportunity for thoughtful, rational criticism and comment. [3 of 6] - Jef Wrestling with Transhumanism :: Katherine Hayles :: Global Spiral Wrestling with Transhumanism By Katherine Hayles Transhumanism for me is like a relationship with an obsessive and very neurotic lover. Knowing it is deeply flawed, I have tried several times to break off my engagement, but each time it manages to creep in through the back door of my mind. In *How We Became Posthuman*,1 I identified an undergirding assumption that makes possible such predictions as Hans Moravec's transhumanist fantasy that we will soon be able to upload our consciousness into computers and leave our bodies behind. I argued that this scenario depends on a decontextualized and disembodied construction of information. The disembodied information Claude Shannon formalized as a probability function, useful for specific purposes, has been expanded far beyond its original context and inappropriately applied to such phenomena as consciousness.2 With this argument, I naively thought that I had dismissed transhumanism once and for all, exposing its misapprehensions to my satisfaction and delivering a decisive blow to its aspirations. But I was wrong. Transhumanism has exponentially more adherents today than it did a decade ago when I made this argument, and its influence is clearly growing rather than diminishing, as this workshop itself testifies. [image: Android Missing Head] There are, of course, many versions of transhumanism, and they do not all depend on the assumption I critiqued. But all of them, I will argue, perform decontextualizing moves that over-simplify the situation and carry into the new millennium some of the most questionable aspects of capitalist ideology. Why then is transhumanism appealing, despite its problems? Most versions share the assumption that technology is involved in a spiraling dynamic of co-evolution with human development. This assumption, known as technogenesis, seems to me compelling and indeed virtually irrefutable, applying not only to contemporary humans but to *Homo sapiens* across the eons, shaping the species biologically, psychologically, socially and economically. While I have serious disagreements with most transhumanist rhetoric, the transhumanist community is one that is fervently involved in trying to figure out where technogenesis is headed in the contemporary era and what it implies about our human future. This is its positive contribution, and from my point of view, why it is worth worrying about. How can we extract the valuable questions transhumanism confronts without accepting all the implications of transhumanist claims? One possibility is to embed transhumanist ideas in deep, rich, and challenging contextualizations that re-introduce the complexities it strips away. The results re-frame the questions, leading to conclusions very different than those most transhumanists embrace. In these encounters, transhumanism serves as the catalyst?or better, the irritant?that stimulates a more considered and responsible view of the future than it itself can generate. As a literary scholar, I consider the *locus classicus* for re-framing transhumanist questions to be science fiction and speculative fiction, jointly signified by SF. To initiate my inquiry, I will focus on the critical area of reproduction?reproduction of individuals through children, reproduction of the species through technology as well as biology, and reproduction of psychological, philosophical, social and economic institutions that facilitate and/or threaten the continued existence of humans as a species. To see why reproduction is at the center of transhumanist concerns, we need only consider the rhetoric of the "singularity," a term introduced by SF writer and mathematician Vernon Vinge to indicate a decisive break in which advanced technology catapults us into a future qualitatively different from all previous human experience. Within a few years, Vinge predicts, we will confront a change comparable to the rise of life on earth; "the precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence." 3So different will our future be, the story goes, that it is impossible for us accurately to predict it from our position on this side of the break. Insofar as reproduction implies continuities between past and future, it challenges the idea of a cataclysmic break, while simultaneously acting as a privileged site for visions of radical ruptures and transformations. Reproduction, then, is where the rubber hits the road?where issues of what will change and what will endure are imagined, performed, and contested. Before demonstrating that SF re-contextualizes crucial issues surrounding reproduction, I will find it useful to review briefly the ideologies implicit in transhumanist rhetoric. Transhumanism, sometimes signified by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University and one of transhumanism's more thoughtful practitioners, gives a two-fold definition on the World Transhumanist Association website: (1) The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. (2) The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies.5 As these examples illustrate, transhumanist rhetoric concentrates on individual transcendence; at transhumanist websites, articles, and books, there is a conspicuous absence of considering socioeconomic dynamics beyond the individual. Bostrom, for example, writes of "making widely available technologies to eliminate ageing," but what this would do to population growth, limited resources, and the economics of the young supporting the old are not considered. Transhumanists recognize, of course, that contemporary technoscience is not an individual enterprise, typically requiring significant capitalization, large teams of workers, and extensive networks of knowledge exchange and distribution, but these social, technoscientific, and economic realities are positioned as if they are undertaken for the sole benefit of forward-thinking individuals. In addition, there is little discussion of how access to advanced technologies would be regulated or of the social and economic inequalities entwined with questions of access. The rhetoric implies that everyone will freely have access (as in the quotation cited above), or at least that transhumanist individuals will be among the privileged elite that can afford the advantages advanced technologies will offer. How this will play out for the large majority of people living in developing countries that cannot afford access and do not have the infrastructure to support it is not an issue. Indeed, the rhetoric often assumes that, as Iain Banks puts in his transhumanist far-future novel *Look to Windward*,6 the Age of Scarcity is a passing phase in human evolution that our descendants will leave far behind, with death, hunger, disease, and other afflictions brought under control and subject to the whim of individual choice. Resisting these utopian visions are the sociological, philosophical, and psychological complexities (a constellation that Iain Banks has usefully called "metalogy" ) that operate at their most fraught with reproduction. Consistent with the transhumanist emphasis on the individual, reproduction typically figures in transhumanist rhetoric as the reproduction of the individual through cloning, cryogenic suspension, radical life extension, and uploading human consciousness into a computer. In all these versions, the rhetoric assumes that the individual will maintain his identity intact. As Hans Moravec's fantasy scenario of uploading in *Mind Children* makes clear, not only is identity is preserved, but the uploaded consciousness is represented as seamlessly continuous with the embodied mind.8 Whether a reproduced consciousness would in fact be identical (or even similar) is a point of intense interrogation in SF. In Greg Egan's *Permutation City*, for example, an uploaded consciousness finds the awareness that it has become a computer program unbearable, and all such consciousnesses commit suicide (or try to) within fifteen minutes of coming to awareness.9 Equally controversial are issues surrounding the reproduction of the species. Transhumanist rhetoric assumes that "we" will become citizens of a transhuman future, an assumption existing in uneasy tension with the decisive break implied by the singularity. Who or what will be left behind, and what global conflicts might result from class and economic disparities, are seldom discussed. When such issues are entertained, as in Moravec's claim that intelligent machines will be our evolutionary successors and that we will embrace them as "mind children," the rhetoric implies that these silicon progeny will inspire the same emotional investment, love, and pride that (sometimes) accompanies biological reproduction. Whether deep-seated responses evolved through millennia of biological reproduction would map seamlessly onto intelligent machines created through entirely different mechanisms is typically not a concern. The metalogical (i.e., the psychological, physiological, and philosophical) contextualizations SF performs draw thee assumptions into question. In Philip K. Dick's *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?*, the issues surrounding reproduction are enacted in multiple ways, including through the surrogacy of animal procreation.10 Rick Deckard's argument with his neighbor about whether it is immoral to own more than one animal when others (like him) own none is precipitated by the neighbor's announcement that his Percheron mare is pregnant. A similar dialogue occurs when Deckard negotiates with Rachel Rosen for part of Scrappy the owl's brood?until he realizes that the owl is a mechanical replica, biological owls having been extinct for decades. These minor incidents serve as a backdrop to the major issue of human reproduction. Deckard dons a lead codpiece when he goes outside to protect his gonads from the radioactive dust that has covered the planet since World War Terminus. He undergoes regular testing and has so far managed to maintain a sperm count that allows him to be classified "normal" within the limits defined by law, but thousands fail each month as their reproductive (and intellectual) capacities plummet below the line, condemning them to the category of "specials," who are not allowed to emigrate off-planet and can look forward only to further decline. The biological reproductive future of humankind appears doomed; their evolutionary successors will clearly be the androids, now so sophisticated and intelligent that they already surpass human capabilities in many respects. In sharp contrast to Moravec's vision of a humanity that embraces its postbiological successors, humans in Dick's novel cling to every possible vestige of superiority, however spurious, and ruthlessly oppress the androids, condemning them to lives of slavery in the hellish conditions of Mars and other off-world colonies. Humans will not, it appears, go gently into that good night. Ridley Scott's brilliant film adaptation11 picks up on this theme, representing Roy Baty, leader of the rebellious androids, as the errant son of Tyrell, CEO of the company that created him and the other Nexus-6 androids. Although the androids do not manage to wrest a longer life span from their "father" and eventually are all killed, as they are in Dick's novel; the novel makes clear that this postbiological species will nevertheless triumph as humans fade from the scene, victims of their own environmental folly. The empathic (and viscously competitive) bond in the film between father and postbiological child plays out differently in the novel, with empathy partitioned among species and alleged to be possible only with humans and animals, with androids positioned outside and exterior to this privileged emotion. This ideological configuration, promoted by the government as a justification for human superiority and android oppression, is confounded when Deckard realizes he feels empathy for at least some androids. The resulting ethical and psychological complexities entwine reproduction with political ideology, species identification with cross-species empathy, and the individual with global dynamics that dictate the outcome of the war, regardless of individual contests such as those waged by Deckard. When the child is not an android but a biological progeny, the prospect of a transhuman future is, if possible, even more contentious. Novels exploring the parent-biological child relationship range from Arthur C. Clarke's *Childhood's End*,12 in which the children become a successor species, to Vernon Vinge's near-future world in *Rainbows End*,13 where the generations are separated only by technological expertise and quickness in adapting to it. At the passionate end of the spectrum is Greg Bear's *Darwin's Radio* and the sequel, *Darwin's Children* 14 Rather than imagine a future in which technology creates a postbiological future, Bear speculates that the human genome can function as a non-conscious genetic engineer of sorts, responding to global factors such as "stress" by activating an ancient human endogenous virus (significantly nicknamed SHEVA) that causes genetic mutations in fetuses. In ironic inversion of the AIDS virus, SHEVA infects only couples in monogamous committed relationships and has its epicenter in the US and Europe, while Africa is not hit nearly as hard hit. With the threat looming close to home, emotional tensions are exacerbated when the mutational process causes a two-step pregnancy. The first fetus, initially mistaken as the virus's final product, is horribly malformed by conventional standards, with virtually no brain, rudimentary appendages, a Cyclopean head formation, and a functional ovary. It invariably aborts at the end of the first trimester, and images of the miscarried fetuses cause worldwide panic among pregnant women and their partners. The first fetus's purpose, it turns out, is to release an egg that initiates a second pregnancy without further fertilization from sperm. The emotional thumbscrews are tightened when male partners refuse to believe that their women could become pregnant for a second time without having sex with other men, and violence against women spikes worldwide. Further complicating these dynamics is the possibility, trumpeted by the dangerously ambitious governmental functionary Mark Augustine, that the SHEVA virus is activating other ancient retroviruses in the human genome, releasing a pandemic of diseases unknown for millennia. The resulting world-wide riots, corporate intrigue, and global panic lead to unprecedented crises in which the civil rights of SHEVA children and their parents are shredded. Against this backdrop is set the drama of Mitch and Kaye, who knowingly have a SHEVA child, Stella Nova (the new species, they decide, should be named *Homo sapiens novus*). Stella evokes from them the traditional desire to protect, nurture, and love her, so the tension here is not so much between the parents and child as between the family unit and the society that fears, stigmatizes, and hunts them. Although Bear could be accused of sensationalism, insofar as he relies on the raw emotional impact of aborted fetuses, children born dead with monstrous deformities, and societal witch-hunts, he nevertheless recognizes the inherent tensions, conflicts, and social upheavals that would be unleashed by the appearance of a new generation of children so superior to their parents that they will obviously be the successor species, spelling the eventual doom of *Homo sapiens sapiens*. Perhaps the most explicit SF confrontation with transhumanist philosophy occurs in Nancy Kress's novella "Beggars in Spain," later expanded to a novel and a sequel. Kenzo Yagai is the text's philosopher-economist who serves as the fictional counterpart to Ayn Rand, often cited on transhumanist websites as one of the founding thinkers of the movement.15 Initially infatuated with Rand's extreme individualism, its concomitant ideology of free-market capitalism unhampered by regulation, and a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest in which the fit are those who can most effectively exploit the free market, Kress became disenchanted with Rand's Objectivist philosophy and wrote "Beggars in Spain" in rebuttal.17 In Yagaiist philosophy,18 the contract freely entered into by individuals is seen as the basis for a good society, in part because it is an advance over social systems based on coercion. The premise is tested by embedding it in a reproductive context in which Roger Camden, self-made millionaire and confirmed Yagaiist, arranges for a genetic intervention that will yield a daughter (intelligent, blond, long-legged, attractive) who will not need to sleep. Unexpectedly, however, his wife (a bit player in Camden's life) conceives twins: Leisha, the engineered baby, is one of the Sleepless, while Alice is a "normal" child who requires sleep. The match-up allows the effects of this seemingly minor genetic alteration?eliminating the need for sleep?to be explored and dramatized. While Alice progresses at the usual rate, Leisha, apple of her father's eye, zooms ahead of her twin intellectually. She is Camden's "special" (i.e.. "real") daughter not only because he paid for her genetic alteration but also because she buys in wholeheartedly to her father's Yagaiist doctrine of individual achievement, allowing him to reproduce ideologically as well as genetically. As with other SF interventions, Kress does not allow the narrative to remain focused entirely on the individual but rather sketches a broader social context. The Sleepless form networks among themselves as they encounter increasing resentment and sanctions from the majority Sleepers, who contend that the Sleepless have unfair advantages because they have, in effect, 33% more time at their disposal in which to study, learn, and achieve. The social landscape in which Leisha grows up is rife with conflicts between "normal" humans and the transhuman Sleepless, who as they grow up prove to be not only highly intelligent and high-achieving but also resistant to aging, with life expectancies measured is hundreds rather than decades of years. Already numbering in the hundred thousands, the Sleepless in a dozen generations appear to be on track to become the successor species to *Homo sapiens sapiens* (perhaps as *Homo sapiens sleepless*). Despite the growing tensions, Leisha struggles to retain ties to Sleepers, including her sister Alice. The eponymous "beggars in Spain" represent a strong challenge to that desire. Her Sleepless friend Tony argues that high-achieving Sleepless have more to offer than Sleepers and, in the face of increasing prejudice against them, should withdraw to form their own society. He asks her if she would give money to a beggar in Spain; Leisha says yes. Then what about two beggars, three, a hundred, a thousand? The lesson Tony means to teach is to show that the basis for a shared society?that is, the contract that reciprocally benefits both participants?breaks down when those who have nothing to give outnumber those who have much to give, for any contract must then be unequal and hence unfair to the privileged. Of course, there would be other ways to interpret the conundrum, for example deciding that it shows the limitations of the contract as a basis for social interactions. This is the interpretation Leisha eventually chooses, replacing the contract, and the individualistic ideology that underwrites it with an "ecology of help" in which assistance is extended even to those who cannot reciprocate in kind. This modest intervention stops short of a wholesale critique of Rand's Objectivism, however, for in this view society is still be based on exchanges between willing partners, with the modification that the exchange may be be unequal and indirect, circling through a network before benefits are returned to the giver. That the system might be based on entirely different principles than exchange remains unthought and unarticulated. Despite this limitation, the story, poignantly conceived and skillfully written, shows that reproduction is deeply enmeshed with visions of a transhumanist future and the ethical and social issues it raises. More startling in its probing implications is James Patrick Kelly's novella, "Mr. Boy."19 This fine example of SF grotesque inverts the usual perspective; rather than exploring the dynamics between a parent and transhuman child, it focuses on the tensions between a transhuman parent and child. The protagonist is a twenty-five year old male who, at his mother's behest, has his genes periodically "stunted" so that his body remains, emotionally and physically, that of a twelve-year-old boy. Situated in a posthuman future in which his constant companion is a robot and his best friend has had himself "twanked" so that he resembles a dinosaur, Mr. Boy inhabits the site of the mother?literally. She has had her body transformed into a three-quarter scale replica of the Statue of Liberty, and Mr. Boy resides within the multistory edifice. He communicates with his mother via her "remotes," robots that carry out specific functions indicated by their names, "Nanny," "Cook," "Greeter," and the sex couple, "Lovey" and "Dear," who express and perform Mom's erotic urges in a room wired to Liberty's head, presumably the site of her conscious (and unconscious) thoughts. In this grotesque tale, life and death are systemically confused, each blending into and contaminating the other. Mr. Boy calls the hospital staff people that oversee his stunting "stiffs," and his prized porn collection consists entirely of images of the dead?preferably with their teeth showing. While his friend Stennie practices for his first real-life romantic encounter with a girlfriend by having sex with "Lovey," Mr. Boy, who sets up with encounter with his mother's remote and watches while it proceeds, confesses "I had always found sex kind of dull." Turning instead to his corpse porn, he associates the "soft wet slap of flesh against flesh" with "my mother's brain, up there in the head where no one ever went" (179). The mother is thus both eroticized and "boring," absent and present, permissive and imprisoning, presumably alive and yet inanimate. The conflicted and perverse contexts of reproduction represented here point to the ways in which advanced technology has been (mis)used to disrupt the age-old order of things: the mother, instead of watching her son grow up, intervenes to keep him forever on the child side of puberty; the man, trapped within a boy's body, finds excitement in the dead and is bored by procreation; the separation in which the man leaves the mother behind to find a mate is forestalled because he continues literally to live within his mother's body, as if still in the womb. Weary of being stunted, Mr. Boy begins to see his life in a different perspective when he meets Tree, a young woman whose parents are "realists," hard-core resistors who reason that "first came clothes, then jewelry, fashion, makeup, plastic surgery, skin tints, and hey jack! here we are up to our eyeballs in the delusions of 2096" (172), careening down the slippery slope to gene twanking and uploading consciousness into a computer. The irony of being trapped within Liberty comes to a head (so to speak) when Mr. Boy discovers there is nothing in the head; his mother had died years ago and has been running her operation as an uploaded consciousness. After a final confrontation with Mom, Mr. Boy takes back his given name "Peter" and finally leaves her, preferring to walk away rather than go through the court proceedings that would enable him to claim his family inheritance by declaring her legally dead, uploaders not being considered persons and so having no legal rights. One need not agree with Francis Fukuyama that transhumanism is "the world's most dangerous idea" to appreciate the critiques of transhumanism enacted in these SF fictions.20 When advanced technologies come together with reproduction to reconfigure metalogical dynamics at every level, from the individual to the family to the nation-state and globalized society, it is impossible to predict accurately all the consequences or to trammel them up, as transhumanist rhetoric implies, using reason, technology, and science. As the SF fictions interrogated have shown, evolution has twisted together biology and culture in strands of enormous complexity, and cutting some of strands with advanced technologies or rearranging them into pattern altogether different almost certainly will entail unanticipated consequences and corollary changes in other areas whose association with the primary changes were not even known. At issue are the emotional dynamics of population change as people confront the possibility that *Homo sapiens sapiens* may not be the terminys of evolutionary processes; of parents engendering children so different from them they can scarcely make contact over the generation gap; of children contemplating parents whose closely held assumptions are no longer viable in a posthuman future. Each of these scenarios involves complexities for which the transhumanist philosophy is simply not able to account or to understand, much less to explain. Reason is certainly needed, but so are emotion, systemic analysis, ecological thinking, and ethical consideration. As Pynchon's narrator in *Gravity's Rainbow* observes, "Everything is connected." I do not necessarily agree with Fukuyama's argument that we should outlaw such developments as human cloning with legislation forbidding it (not least because he falls back on "human nature" as a justification), but I do think we should take advantage of every available resource that will aid us in thinking through, as far as we are able, the momentous changes in human life and culture that advanced technologies make possible?and these resources can and should include SF fictions. The framework in which transhumanism considers these questions is, I have argued, too narrow and ideologically fraught with individualism and neoliberal philosophy to be fully up to the task. It can best serve by catalyzing questions and challenging us to imagine fuller contextualizations for the developments it envisions. Imagining the future is never a politically innocent or ethically neutral act. To arrive at the future we want, we must first be able to imagine it as fully as we can, including all the contexts in which its consequences will play out. *Endnotes* 1 N. Katherine Hayles, *How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 2 Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, *The Mathematical Theory of Communication*(Urbana: University of Illinois Pres, 1949). 3 Vernon Vinge, "Vernon Vinge: The Singularity" (1993), http://kuoi.com/~kamikaze/doc/vinge.html . 4 Max More, "Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy" (1996), http://www.maxmore.com/transhum.htm. 5 Nick Botrom, "What is Transhumanism?", FAQ, World Transhumanist Association, http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/w/faq2. 6 Iain Banks, *Look to Windward* (New York: Pocket Books, 2000). 7 "Metalogical . . . is short for psycho-physio-philosophical," Iain Banks*, Look to Windward *(New York: Pocket Books, 2000), p. 83. 8 Hans Moravec, *Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence*(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 109-10. 9 Greg Egan, *Permutation** City* (New York: HarperPrism, 1995). 10 Philip K. Dick, *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?* (published under the title *Blade Runner*, New York: Ballantine Books, 1982). 11 *Blade Runner*, directed Ridley Scott, released June 25, 1982. 12 Arthur C. Clarke, *Childhood's End* (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, in conjunction with Ballantine Books, 1953). 13 Vernon Vinge, *Rainbows End: A Novel with One Foot in the Future* (New York: Tor Books, 2006). 14 Greg Bear, *Darwin's Radio* (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999); Greg Bear, *Darwin's Children* (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003). 15 Ayn Rand, writer and philosopher, is the author of *The Fountainhead *(1947), *Atlas Shrugged* (1953), and with Nathaniel Branden, *The Virtue of Selfishness*(1954). Having read Ayn Rand myself in college, I assumed that she would be ancient history to today's college students, but I was surprised when most of my students (in a 100-person lecture class) had read her. 16 In "Interview with Nancy Kress," Carina Bj?rklind asks Kress about Ayn Rand answers so: "The thing about Ayn Rand, with whom I was enraptured when I was in my early twenties as so many people are, and who I eventually outgrew, as many people do, is that although there's something very appealing about her emphasis on individual responsibility, that you should not evade reality, you should not evade responsibility, you should not assume that it's up to the next person to provide you with your life . . . but . . . pushed to its really logical conclusion, objectivism, Any Rand's philosophy, lacks all compassion, and even more fundamental, it lacks recognition of the fact that we are a social species and that our society does not exist of a group of people only striving for their own ends . . . but groups of people co-operating for mutual ends, and this means that you don't always get what you want and your work does not always benefit you directly," http://www.lysator.liu/se/lsff/mb-nr28/Interview_with_Nancy_Kress.html. 17 In the preface to the novel version of *Beggars in Spain*, Nancy Kress writes that "I was nagged by the feeling that Leisha's story had only begun. I wanted to explore the long-range economic effects of creating a favored class of people in a United States becoming increasingly polarized between rich and poor. I also wanted to work out my reactions to other writers' philosophies: to Ayn Rand's belief that no human being owes anything to any other except what is agreed to in a voluntary contract," "Preface," *Beggars in Spain* (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), xii. 18 For the novella, see Nancy Kress, "Beggars in Spain," in *The Best of the Best, Volume 2: 20 Years of the Best Short Science Fiction Novels*, edited Gardner Dozois (New York: St. Martin'sGriffin, 2007), pp. 204-260. 19 James Patrick Kelly, "Mr. Boy," in *The Best of the Best, Volume 2: 20 Years of the Best Short Science Fiction Novels*, edited Gardner Dozois (New York: St. Martin'sGriffin, 2007), pp. 158-203. 20 Francis Fukuyama, "Transhumanism: The World's Most Dangerous Ideas," *Foreign Policy * (September/October 2004). http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=2667. * **[image: Separater]* *A paper prepared for the "Transhumanism and the Meanings of Progress" workshop, ASU, Tempe, AZ, April 24-25, 2008.** Published 2008.06.05 * *Comments:* Share your thoughts on this article: View / Add Comments (0) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Jun 12 14:01:53 2008 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 07:01:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Cybernetics Is An Antihumanism: Advanced Technologies and the Rebellion Against the Human Condition :: Jean-Pierre Dupuy :: Global Spiral In-Reply-To: <22360fa10806120629m86a021l61f94f11de908c41@mail.gmail.com> References: <22360fa10806120629m86a021l61f94f11de908c41@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Here's an excellent opportunity for thoughtful, rational criticism and comment. [5 of 6] - Jef Cybernetics Is An Antihumanism: Advanced Technologies and the Rebellion Against the Human Condition :: Jean-Pierre Dupuy :: Global Spiral Cybernetics Is An Antihumanism: Advanced Technologies and the Rebellion Against the Human Condition By Jean-Pierre Dupuy *Foreword* I chose the topic of my contribution to our workshop after I discovered, first with amazement, then with wonder, N. Katherine Hayles's beautiful book, *How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics*1. Amazement because she and I worked on the same fairly confidential corpus, in particular the proceedings of the Macy conferences, which were the birthplace of cybernetics and, I have claimed, of cognitive science, we celebrate the same heroes, in particular Warren McCulloch, Heinz von Foerster and Francisco Varela, and, in spite of these shared interests and passions, we apparently never heard of each other. She and I live and work worlds and languages apart. The world is still far from being a close-knit village. Wonder at realizing how from the same corpus we could arrive at interpretations that, although compatible or even complementary, are so richly diverse or even divergent. My book on the Macy conferences and the origins of cybernetics and cognitive science, *Sur l'origine des sciences cognitives*, was first published in French in 19852; a second and completely revised edition followed in 19943; the first English-language edition, an extensively revised and amplified version of the latter, came out in 20004. It is with shame that I acknowledge that during all this time, I never came across Ms. Hayles' work, published in book form in 1999. It is with great sadness that I realize that there is no longer any way that I could ask my two great friends, Heinz von Foerster and Francisco Varela, two men of communication, why they never put us in touch. The Chilean neurophilosopher, Francisco Varela, was the cofounder of the theory of autopoietic systems; he chose to come to France and work in my research institution after he was expelled from his country. Heinz von Foerster, a Viennese Jewish immigrant to the United States, after serving as secretary to the Macy Conferences, went on to found what was to be called second-order cybernetics. Francisco and Heinz play important roles in the story that I tell in my book. The former passed away in 2000; the latter in 2002. I miss them both terribly. My book seeks to disabuse readers of a number of ideas that I consider mistaken. Cybernetics calls to mind a series of familiar images that turn out on closer inspection to be highly doubtful. As the etymology of the word suggests, cybernetics is meant to signify control, mastery, governance?in short, the philosophical project associated with Descartes, who assigned mankind the mission of exercising dominion over the world, and over mankind itself. Within the cybernetics movement, this view was championed by Norbert Wiener?unsurprisingly, perhaps, since it was Wiener who gave it its name. But this gives only a very partial, if not superficial idea of what cybernetics was about, notwithstanding that even a philosopher of such penetrating insight as Heidegger was taken in by it. [image: bubbles] In my work, I have relied on the notion, due to Karl Popper, of a *metaphysical research program*, which is to say a set of presuppositions about the structure of the world that are neither testable nor empirically falsifiable, but without which no science would be possible. For there is no science that does not rest on a metaphysics, though typically it remains concealed. It is the responsibility of the philosopher to uncover this metaphysics, and then to subject it to criticism. What I have tried to show is that cybernetics, far from being the apotheosis of Cartesian humanism, as Heidegger supposed, actually represented a crucial moment in its demystification, and indeed in its deconstruction. To borrow a term that has been applied to the structuralist movement in the human sciences, cybernetics constituted a decisive step in the rise of *antihumanism. *Consider, for example, the way in which cybernetics conceived the relationship between man and machine. The philosophers of consciousness were not alone in being caught up in the trap set by a question such as "Will it be possible one day to design a machine that thinks?" The cybernetician's answer, rather in the spirit of Moli?re, was: "Madame, you pride yourself so on thinking. And yet, you are only a machine!" The aim of cognitive science always was?and still is today?the mechanization of the mind, not the humanization of the machine. "Continental" political philosophy has yet to acknowledge the notion of posthumanism. On the other hand, the notion of antihumanism has been debated for at least four decades. My contribution will bear on the latter only. My hope is that our workshop will enable us to explore the possible connections between the two notions and, beyond, perhaps, bridge the gap between two cultural worlds so far apart. *1. Heidegger's Error* I will start with a classic question: can the idea that we have of the human person, which is to say of ourselves, survive the forward march of scientific discovery? It is a commonplace that from Copernicus to molecular biology, and from Marx to Freud along the way, we have had steadily to abandon our proud view of ourselves as occupying a special place in the universe, and to admit that we are at the mercy of determinisms that leave little room for what we have been accustomed to consider our freedom and our reason. Is not cognitive science now in the process of completing this process of disillusionment and demystification by showing us that just where we believe we sense the workings of a mind, there is only the firing of neural networks, no different in principle than an ordinary electric circuit? The task in which I have joined with many others, faced with reductive interpretations of scientific advance of this sort, has been to defend the values proper to the human person, or, to put it more bluntly, to defend humanism against the excesses of science and technology. Heidegger completely inverted this way of posing the problem. For him it was no longer a question of defending humanism but rather of indicting it. As for science and technology, or rather "technoscience" (an expression meant to signify that science is subordinated to the practical ambition of achieving mastery over the world through technology), far from threatening human values, they are on Heidegger's view the most striking manifestation of them. This dual reversal is so remarkable that it deserves to be considered in some detail, even?or above all?in a reflection on the place of cybernetics in the history of ideas, for it is precisely cybernetics that found itself to be the principal object of Heidegger's attack. In those places where Heideggerian thought has been influential, it became impossible to defend human values against the claims of science. This was particularly true in France, where structuralism?and then poststructuralism?reigned supreme over the intellectual landscape for several decades before taking refuge in the literature departments of American universities. Anchored in the thought of the three great Germanic "masters of suspicion"?Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud?against a common background of Heideggerianism, the human sciences *? la fran?aise* made antihumanism their watchword5, loudly celebrating exactly what humanists dread: the death of man. This unfortunate creature, or rather a certain image that man created of himself, was reproached for being "metaphysical." With Heidegger, "metaphysics" acquired a new and quite special sense, opposite to its usual meaning. For positivists ever since Comte, the progress of science had been seen as forcing the retreat of metaphysics; for Heidegger, by contrast, technoscience represented the culmination of metaphysics. And the height of metaphysics was nothing other than cybernetics. Let us try to unravel this tangled skein. For Heidegger, metaphysics is the search for an ultimate foundation for all reality, for a "primary being" in relation to which all other beings find their place and purpose. Where traditional metaphysics ("onto-theology") had placed God, modern metaphysics substituted man. This is why modern metaphysics is fundamentally humanist, and humanism fundamentally metaphysical. Man is a subject endowed with consciousness and will: his features were described at the dawn of modernity in the philosophy of Descartes and Leibniz. As a conscious being, he is present and transparent to himself; as a willing being, he causes things to happen as he intends. Subjectivity, both as theoretical presence to oneself and as practical mastery over the world, occupies center stage in this scheme?whence the Cartesian promise to make man "master and possessor of nature." In the metaphysical conception of the world, Heidegger holds, everything that exists is a slave to the purposes of man; everything becomes an object of his will, fashionable as a function of his ends and desires. The value of things depends solely on their capacity to help man realize his essence, which is to achieve mastery over being. It thus becomes clear why technoscience, and cybernetics in particular, may be said to represent the completion of metaphysics. To contemplative thought?thought that poses the question of meaning and of Being, understood as the sudden appearance of things, which escapes all attempts at grasping it?Heidegger opposes "calculating" thought. This latter type is characteristic of all forms of planning that seek to attain ends by taking circumstances into account. Technoscience, insofar as it constructs mathematical models to better establish its mastery over the causal organization of the world, knows only calculating thought. Cybernetics is precisely that which calculates?computes?in order to govern, in the nautical sense (Wiener coined the term from the Greek xvbepvntns, meaning "steersman"): it is indeed the height of metaphysics. Heidegger anticipated the objection that would be brought against him: "Because we are speaking against humanism people fear a defense of the inhuman and a glorification of barbaric brutality. For what is more *logical * than that for somebody who negates humanism nothing remains but the affirmation of inhumanity?"6Heidegger defended himself by attacking. Barbarism is not to be found where one usually looks for it. The true barbarians are the ones who are supposed to be humanists, who, in the name of the dignity that man accords himself, leave behind them a world devastated by technology, a desert in which no one can truly be said to dwell. Let us for the sake of argument grant the justice of Heidegger's position. At once an additional enigma presents itself. If for him cybernetics really represented the apotheosis of metaphysical humanism, how are we to explain the fact that the human sciences in France, whose postwar development I have just said can be understood only against the background of Heidegger's philosophy, availed themselves of the conceptual toolkit of cybernetics in order to deconstruct the metaphysics of subjectivity? How is it that these sciences, in their utter determination to put man as subject to death, each seeking to outdo the other's radicalism, should have found in cybernetics the weapons for their assaults? >From the beginning of the 1950s?which is to say, from the end of the first cybernetics?through the 1960s and 1970s, when the second cybernetics was investigating theories of self-organization and cognitivism was on the rise, the enterprise of mechanizing the human world underwent a parallel development on each side of the Atlantic. This common destiny was rarely noticed, perhaps because the thought of any similarity seemed almost absurd: whereas cognitive science claimed to be the avant-garde of modern science, structuralism?followed by poststructuralism?covered itself in a pretentious and often incomprehensible philosophical jargon. What is more, it was too tempting to accuse French deconstructionists of a fascination with mathematical concepts and models that they hardly understood. But even if this way of looking at the matter is not entirely unjustified, it only scratches the surface. There were very good reasons, in fact, why the deconstruction of metaphysical humanism found in cybernetics an ally of the first order. At the beginning of the 1940s, a philosopher of consciousness such as Sartre could write: "The inhuman is merely . . . the mechanical."7. Structuralists hastened to adopt this definition as their own, while reversing the value assigned to its terms. Doing Heidegger one better, they made a great show of championing the inhuman?which is to say the mechanical8. Cybernetics, as it happened, was ready to hand, having come along at just the right moment to demystify the voluntary and conscious subject. The will? All its manifestations could apparently be simulated, and therefore duplicated, by a simple negative feedback mechanism. Consciousness? The "Cybernetics Group"9had examined the Freudian unconscious, whose existence was defended by one of its members, Lawrence Kubie, and found it chimerical. If Kubie often found himself the butt of his colleagues' jokes, it was not because he was thought to be an enemy of human dignity. It was rather because the postulation of a hidden entity, located in the substructure of a purportedly conscious subject, manifesting itself only through symptoms while yet being endowed with the essential attributes of the subject (intentionality, desires, beliefs, presence to oneself, and so on), seemed to the cyberneticians nothing more than a poor conjuring trick aimed at keeping the structure of subjectivity intact. It is remarkable that a few years later the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, along with the anthropologist Claude L?vi-Strauss and the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (one of the founders of structuralism), should have adopted the same critical attitude toward Freud as cybernetics. The father of psychoanalysis had been led to postulate an improbable "death wish"?"beyond the pleasure principle," as he put it?as if the subject actually desired the very thing that made him suffer, by voluntarily and repeatedly placing himself in situations from which he could only emerge battered and hurt. This compulsion (*Zwang*) to repeat failure Freud called *Wiederholungszwang*, an expression translated by Lacan as "automatisme de r?p?tition," which is to say the *automatism* of repetition. In so doing he replaced the supposed unconscious death wish with the senseless functioning of a machine, the unconscious henceforth being identified with a cybernetic automaton. The alliance of psychoanalysis and cybernetics was neither anecdotal nor fortuitous: it corresponded to a radicalization of the critique of metaphysical humanism. There was a deeper reason for the encounter between the French *sciences de l'homme* and cybernetics, however. What structuralism sought to conceive?in the anthropology of L?vi-Strauss, for example, and particularly in his study of systems of exchange in traditional societies?was a subjectless cognition, indeed cognition without mental content. Whence the project of making "symbolic thought" a mechanism peculiar not to individual brains but to "unconscious" linguistic structures that automatically operate behind the back, as it were, of unfortunate human "subjects," who are no more than a sort of afterthought. "It thinks" was destined to take the place once and for all of the Cartesian cogito. Now cognition without a subject was exactly the unlikely configuration that cybernetics seemed to have succeeded in conceiving. Here again, the encounter between cybernetics and structuralism was in no way accidental. It grew out of a new intellectual necessity whose sudden emergence appears in retrospect as an exceptional moment in the history of ideas. *2. The Self-Mechanized Mind* It is time to come back to our enigma, which now may be formulated as a paradox. Was cybernetics the height of metaphysical humanism, as Heidegger maintained, or was it the height of its deconstruction, as certain of Heidegger's followers believe? To this question I believe it is necessary to reply that cybernetics was both things at once, and that this is what made it not only the root of cognitive science, which finds itself faced with the same paradox, but also a turning point in the history of human conceptions of humanity. The title I have given to this section?the self-mechanized mind?appears to have the form of a self-referential statement, not unlike those strange loops the cyberneticians were so crazy about, especially the cyberneticians of the second phase. But this is only an appearance: the mind that carries out the mechanization and the one that is the object of it are two distinct (albeit closely related) entities, like the two ends of a seesaw, the one rising ever higher in the heavens of metaphysical humanism as the other descends further into the depths of its deconstruction. In mechanizing the mind, in treating it as an artifact, the mind presumes to exercise power over this artifact to a degree that no psychology claiming to be scientific has ever dreamed of attaining. The mind can now hope not only to manipulate this mechanized version of itself at will, but even to reproduce and manufacture it in accordance with its own wishes and intentions. Accordingly, the technologies of the mind, present and future, open up a vast continent upon which man now has to impose norms if he wishes to give them meaning and purpose. The human subject will therefore need to have recourse to a supplementary endowment of will and conscience in order to determine, not what he can do, but what he ought to do?or, rather, what he ought not to do. These new technologies will require a whole ethics to be elaborated, an ethics not less demanding than the one that is slowly being devised today in order to control the rapid development and unforeseen consequences of new biotechnologies. But to speak of ethics, conscience, the will?is this not to speak of the triumph of the subject? The connection between the mechanization of life and the mechanization of the mind is plain. Even if the Cybernetics Group snubbed biology, to the great displeasure of John von Neumann, it was of course a cybernetic metaphor that enabled molecular biology to formulate its central dogma: the genome operates like a computer program. This metaphor is surely not less false than the analogous metaphor that structures the cognitivist paradigm. The theory of biological self-organization, first opposed to the cybernetic paradigm during the Macy Conferences before later being adopted by the second cybernetics as its principal model, furnished then?and still furnishes today?decisive arguments against the legitimacy of identifying DNA with a "genetic program." Nonetheless?and this is the crucial point?even though this identification is profoundly illegitimate from both a scientific and a philosophical point of view, its technological consequences have been considerable. Today, as a result, man may be inclined to believe that he is the master of his own genome. Never, one is tempted to say, has he been so near to realizing the Cartesian promise: he has become?or is close to becoming?the master and possessor of all of nature, up to and including himself. Must we then salute this as yet another masterpiece of metaphysical humanism? It seems at first altogether astonishing, though after a moment's reflection perfectly comprehensible, that a German philosopher following in the tradition of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Peter Sloterdijk, should have recently come forward, determined to take issue with the liberal humanism of his country's philosophical establishment, and boldly affirmed that the new biotechnologies sound the death knell for the era of humanism. Unleashing a debate the like of which is hardly imaginable in any other country, this philosopher ventured to assert: "The domestication of man by man is the great unimagined prospect in the face of which humanism has looked the other way from antiquity until the present day." And to prophesy: It suffices to clearly understand that the next long periods of history will be periods of choice as far as the [human] species is concerned. Then it will be seen if humanity, or at least its cultural elites, will succeed in establishing effective procedures for self-domestication. It will be necessary, in the future, to forthrightly address the issue and formulate a code governing anthropological technologies. Such a code would modify, a posteriori, the meaning of classical humanism, for it would show that * humanitas* consists not only in the friendship of man with man, but that it also implies . . . , in increasingly obvious ways, that man represents the supreme power for man.10 But why should this "superhuman" power of man over himself be seen, in Nietzschean fashion, as representing the death of humanism rather than its apotheosis? For man to be able, as subject, to exercise a power of this sort over himself, it is first necessary that he be reduced to the rank of an object, able to be reshaped to suit any purpose. No raising up can occur without a concomitant lowering, and vice versa. Let us come back to cybernetics and, beyond that, to cognitive science. We need to consider more closely the paradox that an enterprise that sets itself the task of naturalizing the mind should have as its spearhead a discipline that calls itself artificial intelligence. To be sure, the desired naturalization proceeds via mechanization. Nothing about this is inconsistent with a conception of the world that treats nature as an immense computational machine. Within this world man is just another machine?no surprise there. But in the name of what, or of whom, will man, thus artificialized, exercise his increased power over himself? In the name of this very blind mechanism with which he is identified? In the name of a meaning that he claims is mere appearance or phenomenon? His will and capacity for choice are now left dangling over the abyss. The attempt to restore mind to the natural world that gave birth to it ends up exiling the mind from the world and from nature. This paradox is typical of what the French sociologist Louis Dumont, in his magisterial study of the genesis of modern individualism, called the model of modern artificialism in general, the systematic application of an extrinsic, imposed value to the things of the world. Not a value drawn from our belonging to the world, from its harmony and our harmony with it, but a value rooted in our heterogeneity in relation to it: the identification of our will with the will of God (Descartes: man makes himself master and possessor of nature). The will thus applied to the world, the end sought, the motive and the profound impulse of the will are [all] foreign. In other words, they are extra-worldly. Extra-worldliness is now concentrated in the individual will.11 The paradox of the naturalization of the mind attempted by cybernetics, and today by cognitive science, then, is that the mind has been raised up as a demigod in relation to itself. Many of the criticisms brought against the materialism of cognitive science from the point of view either of a philosophy of consciousness or a defense of humanism miss this paradox. Concentrating their (often justified) attacks on the weaknesses and naivet? of such a mechanist materialism, they fail to see that it invalidates itself by placing the human subject outside of the very world to which he is said to belong. The recent interest shown by cognitive science in what it regards as the "mystery" of consciousness seems bound to accentuate this blindness. *3. **The Nanotechnological Dream* 1. I want now to broach not so much the intellectual evolution of cognitive science itself as its embodiment by new technologies, or, as one should rather say, its instantiation by ideas for new technologies. For the moment at least these technologies exist only as projects, indeed in some cases only as dreams. But no matter that many such dreams will acquire physical reality sooner or later, the simple fact that they already exist in people's minds affects how we see the world and how we see ourselves. Since my book was first published, I have thought a great deal about the philosophical foundations of what is called the NBIC Convergence?the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science?and about the ethical implications of this development.12Here I have found many of the same tensions, contradictions, paradoxes, and confusions that I discerned first within cybernetics, and then within cognitive science. But now the potential consequences are far more serious, because we are not dealing with a theoretical matter, a certain view of the world, but with an entire program for acting upon nature and mankind. In searching for the underlying metaphysics of this program, I did not have far to look. One of the first reports of the National Science Foundation devoted to the subject, entitled "Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance," summarizes the credo of the movement in a sort of haiku: If the Cognitive Scientists can think it, The Nano people can build it, The Bio people can implement it, and The IT people can monitor and control it.13 Note that cognitive science plays the leading role in this division of labor, that of thinker?not an insignificant detail, for it shows that the metaphysics of NBIC Convergence is embedded in the work of cognitive scientists. It comes as no surprise, then, that the contradictions inherent in cognitive science should be found at the heart of the metaphysics itself. One of the main themes of my book is the confrontation between Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, Wiener embodying the ideas of control, mastery, and design, von Neumann the ideas of complexity and self-organization. Cybernetics never succeeded in resolving the tension, indeed the contradiction, between these two perspectives; more specifically, it never managed to give a satisfactory answer to the problems involved in realizing its ambition of *designing* an autonomous, self-organizing machine. Nanotechnology?whose wildest dream is to reconstruct the natural world that has been given to us, atom by atom?is caught up in the same contradiction. The most obvious element of the nanotechnological dream is to substitute for what Fran?ois Jacob called *bricolage,* or the tinkering of biological evolution, a paradigm of *design*. Damien Broderick, the Australian cultural theorist and popular science writer, barely manages to conceal his contempt for the world that human beings have inherited when he talks about the likelihood that "nanosystems, designed by human minds, will bypass all this Darwinian wandering, and leap straight to *design success."14 * One can hardly fail to note the irony that science, which in America has had to engage in an epic struggle to root out every trace of creationism (including its most recent avatar, "intelligent design") from public education, should now revert to a logic of design in the form of the nanotechnology program?the only difference being that now it is mankind that assumes the role of the demiurge. Philosophers, faced with the ambition of emerging technologies to supersede nature and life as the engineers of evolution, the designers of biological and natural processes, may suppose that they are dealing with an old idea: Descartes' vision of science as the means by which man may become the master and possessor of nature. Again, however, this is only part of a larger and more complicated picture. As another influential visionary, the American applied physicist Kevin Kelly, revealingly remarked, "It took us a long time to realize that the power of a technology is proportional to its inherent * out-of-controlness*, its inherent ability to surprise and be generative. In fact, unless we can worry about a technology, it is not revolutionary enough."15With NanoBioConvergence, a novel conception of engineering has indeed been introduced. The engineer, far from seeking mastery over nature, is now meant to feel that his enterprise will be crowned by success only to the extent that the system component he has created is capable of surprising him. For whoever wishes ultimately to create a self-organizing system?another word for life?is bound to attempt to reproduce its essential property, namely, the ability to make something that is radically new. In her masterful study of the perils facing mankind, *The Human Condition *(1958), of which we are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary, Hannah Arendt brought out the fundamental paradox of our age: whereas the power of mankind to alter its environment goes on increasing under the stimulus of technological progress, less and less do we find ourselves in a position to control the consequences of our actions. I take the liberty of giving a long quotation here whose pertinence to the subject at hand cannot be exaggerated?keeping in mind, too, that these lines were written fifty years ago: To what extent we have begun to *act into nature*, in the literal sense of the word, is perhaps best illustrated by a recent casual remark of a scientist [Wernher von Braun, December 1957] who quite seriously suggested that "*basic research is when I am doing what I don't know what I am doing." * This started harmlessly enough with the experiment in which men were no longer content to observe, to register, and contemplate whatever nature was willing to yield in her own appearance, but began to prescribe conditions and to provoke natural processes. What then developed into an ever-increasing skill in *unchaining elemental processes,* which, without the interference of men, would have lain dormant and perhaps never have come to pass, has finally ended in a veritable art of *"making" nature,* that is, of creating "natural" processes which without men would never exist and which earthly nature by herself seems incapable of accomplishing.... [N]atural sciences have become exclusively sciences of process and, in their last stage, *sciences of potentially irreversible, irremediable "processes of no return"*....16 The sorcerer's apprentice myth must therefore be updated: it is neither by error nor terror that mankind will be dispossessed of its own creations, but by *design?*which henceforth is understood to signify not mastery, but non-mastery and out-of-controlness. *4. The Rebellion Against the Human Condition* Arendt began the same, decidedly prescient book with the following words: The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environment, but life itself is outside this artificial world, and through life man remains related to all other living organisms. For some time now, a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward making life also "artificial," toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature.... This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by *a rebellion against human existence as it has been given,* a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.17 The nanotechnological dream that began to take shape only a few decades after the utterance of Arendt's prophesy amounts to exactly this revolt against the finiteness, the mortality of the human condition. Human life has an end, for it is promised to death. But not only do the champions of NBIC Convergence oppose themselves to fate, by promising immortality; they quarrel with the very fact that we are born. Their revolt against the given is therefore something subtler and less visible, something still more fundamental, than the revolt against human mortality, for it rejects the notion that we should be brought into the world for no reason. "Human beings are ashamed to have been born instead of made." Thus the German philosopher G?nther Anders (Arendt's first husband and himself a student of Heidegger) characterized the essence of the revolt against the given in his great book, published in 1956, *Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen *--The Antiquatedness (or Obsolescence) of the Human Being.18One cannot help recalling here another philosophical emotion: the nausea described by Jean-Paul Sartre, that sense of forlornness that takes hold of human beings when they realize that they are not the foundation of their own being. The human condition is ultimately one of freedom; but freedom, being absolute, runs up against the obstacle of its own contingency, for we are free to choose anything except the condition of being *un*free. Discovering that we have been *thrown* into the world without any reason, we feel abandoned. Sartre acknowledged his debt to G?nther Anders in expressing this idea by means of a phrase that was to become famous: man is "to freedom condemned."19 Freedom, Sartre held, never ceases trying to "nihilate" that which resists it. Mankind will therefore do everything it can to become its own maker; to owe its freedom to no one but itself. But only things are what they are; only things coincide with themselves. Freedom, on the other hand, is a mode of being that never coincides with itself since it ceaselessly projects itself into the future, desiring to be what it is not. Self-coincidence is what freedom aspires to and cannot attain, just as a moth is irresistibly attracted to the flame that will consume it. A *metaphysical self-made man,*were such a being possible, would paradoxically have lost his freedom, and indeed would no longer be a man at all, since freedom necessarily entails the impossibility of transforming itself into a thing. Thus Anders' notion of "Promethean shame" leads inexorably to the obsolescence of man. Had they lived to see the dawn of the twenty-first century, Sartre and Anders would have found this argument resoundingly confirmed in the shape of the NBIC Convergence?a Promethean project if ever there was one. For the aim of this distinctively metaphysical program is to place mankind in the position of being the divine maker of the world, the demiurge, while at the same time condemning human beings to see themselves as out of date. At the heart of the nanotechnological dream we therefore encounter a paradox that has been with us since the cybernetic chapter in the philosophical history of cognitive science?an extraordinary paradox arising from the convergence of opposites, whereby the overweening ambition and pride of a certain scientific humanism leads directly to the obsolescence of mankind. It is in the light, or perhaps I should say the shadow, of this paradox that all "ethical" questions touching on the engineering of mankind by mankind must be considered. *5. "Playing God" versus the Blurring of Fundamental Distinctions* In 1964, Norbert Wiener published an odd book with the curious title *God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion.* In it one finds this: God is supposed to have made man in His own image, and the propagation of the race may also be interpreted as a function in which one living being makes another in its own image. In our desire to glorify God with respect to man and Man with respect to matter, it is thus natural to assume that machines cannot make other machines in their own image; that this is something associated with a sharp dichotomy of systems into living and non-living; and that it is moreover associated with the other dichotomy between creator and creature. Is this, however, so?20 The rest of the book is devoted to mobilizing the resources of cybernetics to show that these are false dichotomies and that, in truth, "machines are very well able to make other machines in their own image."21 In recent years, the enterprise of "making life from scratch" has been organized as a formal scientific discipline under the seemingly innocuous name of synthetic biology. In June 2007, the occasion of the first Kavli Futures Symposium at the University of Greenland in Ilulissat, leading researchers from around the world gathered to announce the convergence of work in synthetic biology and nanotechnology and to take stock of the most recent advances in the manufacture of artificial cells. Their call for a global effort to promote "the construction or redesign of biological systems components that do not naturally exist" evoked memories of the statement that was issued in Asilomar, California more than thirty years earlier, in 1975, by the pioneers of biotechnology. Like their predecessors, the founders of synthetic biology insisted not only on the splendid things they were poised to achieve, but also on the dangers that might flow from them. Accordingly, they invited society to prepare itself for the consequences, while laying down rules of ethical conduct for themselves.22We know what became of the charter drawn up at Asilomar. A few years later, this attempt by scientists to regulate their own research had fallen to pieces. The dynamics of technological advance and the greed of the marketplace refused to suffer any limitation. Only a week before the symposium in Ilulissat, a spokesman for the ETC Group, an environmental lobby based in Ottawa that has expanded its campaign against genetically modified foods to include emerging nanotechnologies, greeted the announcement of a feat of genetic engineering by the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland with the memorable words, "For the first time, God has competition." In the event, ETC had misinterpreted the nature of the achievement.23But if the Ilulissat Statement is to be believed, the actual synthesis of an organism equipped with an artificial genome ("a free-living organism that can grow and replicate") will become a reality in the next few years. Whatever the actual timetable may turn out to be, the process of fabricating DNA is now better understood with every passing day, and the moment when it will be possible to create an artificial cell using artificial DNA is surely not far off. The question arises, however, whether such an achievement will really amount to *creating life.* In order to assert this much, one must suppose that between life and non-life there is an absolute distinction, a critical threshold, so that whoever crosses it will have shattered a taboo, like the prophet Jeremiah and like Rabbi L?w of Prague in the Jewish tradition, who dared to create an artificial man, a *golem.* In the view of its promoters and some of its admirers, notably the English physicist and science writer Philip Ball24, synthetic biology has succeeded in demonstrating that no threshold of this type exists: between the dust of the earth and the creature that God formed from it, there is no break in continuity that permits us to say (quoting * Genesis* 2:7) that He breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life. And even in the event that synthetic biology should turn out to be incapable of fabricating an artificial cell, these researchers contend, it would still have had the virtue of depriving the prescientific notion of life of all consistency. It is here, in the very particular logic that is characteristic of dreams, that nanotechnology plays an important symbolic role. It is typically defined by the scale of the phenomena over which it promises to exert control?a scale that is described in very vague terms, since it extends from a tenth of a nanometer25to a tenth of a micron. Nevertheless, over this entire gamut, the essential distinction between life and non-life loses all meaning. It is meaningless to say, for example, that a DNA molecule is a living thing. At the symbolic level, a lack of precision in defining nanotechnology does not matter; what matters is the deliberate and surreptitious attempt to blur a fundamental distinction that until now has enabled human beings to steer a course through the world that was given to them. In the darkness of dreams, there is no difference between a living cat and a dead cat. Once again, we find that science oscillates between two opposed attitudes: on the one hand, vainglory, an excessive and often indecent pride; and on the other, when it becomes necessary to silence critics, a false humility that consists in denying that one has done anything out of the ordinary, anything that departs from the usual business of normal science. As a philosopher, I am more troubled by the false humility, for in truth it is this, and not the vainglory, that constitutes the height of pride. I am less disturbed by a science that claims to be the equal of God than by a science that drains one of the most essential distinctions known to humanity since the moment it first came into existence of all meaning: the distinction between that which lives and that which does not; or, to speak more bluntly, between life and death. Let me propose an analogy that is more profound, I believe, than one may at first be inclined to suspect. With the rise of terrorism in recent years, specifically in the form of suicide attacks, violence on a global scale has taken a radically new turn. The first edition of this book belongs to a bygone era, which ended on 11 September 2001. In that world, even the most brutal persecutor expressed his attachment to life, because he killed in order to affirm and assert the primacy of his own way of living. But when the persecutor assumes the role of victim, killing himself in order to maximize the number of people killed around him, all distinctions are blurred, all possibility of reasoned dissuasion is lost, all control of violence is doomed to impotence. If science is allowed, in its turn, to continue along this same path in denying the crucial difference that life introduces in the world, it will, I predict, prove itself to be capable of a violence that is no less horrifying. Among the most extreme promises of nanotechnology, as we have seen, is immortality (or "indefinite life extension," as it is called). But if there is thought to be no essential difference between the living and the non-living, then there is nothing at all extraordinary about this promise. Yet again, Hannah Arendt very profoundly intuited what such a pact with the devil would involve: The greatest and most appalling danger for human thought is that what we once believed could be wiped out by the discovery of some fact that had hitherto remained unknown; for example, it could be that one day we succeed in making men immortal, and everything we had ever thought concerning death and its profundity would then become simply laughable. Some may think that this is too high a price to pay for the suppression of death.26 The ETC Group's premonitory observation?"For the first time, God has competition"?can only strengthen the advocates of the NBIC Convergence in their belief that those who criticize them do so for religious reasons. The same phrases are always used to sum up what is imagined to be the heart of this objection: human beings do not have the right to usurp powers reserved to God alone; *playing God* is forbidden. Often it is added that this taboo is specifically "Judeo-Christian." Let us put to one side the fact that this allegation wholly misconstrues the teaching of the Talmud as well as that of Christian theology. In conflating them with the ancient Greek conception of the sacred?the gods, jealous of men who have committed the sin of pride, *hubris,* send after them the goddess of vengeance, Nemesis?it forgets that the Bible depicts man as co-creator of the world with God. As the French biophysicist and Talmudic scholar Henri Atlan notes with regard to the literature about the Golem: One does not find [in it], at least to begin with, the kind of negative judgment one finds in the Faust legend concerning the knowledge and creative activity of men "in God's image." Quite to the contrary, it is in creative activity that man attains his full humanity, in a perspective of *imitatio Dei* that allows him to be associated with God, in a process of ongoing and perfectible creation.27 Within the Christian tradition, authors such as G. K. Chesterton, Ren? Girard, and Ivan Illich see Christianity as the womb of Western modernity, while arguing that modernity has betrayed and corrupted its message. This analysis links up with the idea, due to Max Weber, of the desacralization of the world?its famous "disenchantment"?in regarding Christianity, or at least what modernity made of it, as the main factor in the progressive elimination of all taboos, sacred prohibitions, and other forms of religious limitation. It fell to science itself to extend and deepen this desacralization, inaugurated by the religions of the Bible, by stripping nature of any prescriptive or normative value. It is utterly futile, then, to accuse science of being at odds with the Judeo-Christian tradition on this point. Kantianism, for its part, conferred philosophical legitimacy on the devaluation of nature by regarding it as devoid of intentions and reasons, inhabited only by causes, and by severing the world of nature from the world of freedom, where the reasons for human action fall under the jurisdiction of moral law. Where, then, is the ethical problem located, if in fact there is one here? It clearly does not lie in the transgression of this or that taboo sanctioned by nature or the sacred, since the joint evolution of religion and science has done away with any such foundation for the very concept of a moral limitation, and hence of a transgression. But that is precisely the problem. For there is no free and autonomous human society that does not rest on some principle of self-limitation. We will not find the limits we desperately need in the religions of the Book, as though such limits are imposed on us by some transcendental authority, for these religions do nothing more than confront us with our own freedom and responsibility. The ethical problem weighs more heavily than any specific question dealing, for instance, with the enhancement of a particular cognitive ability by one or another novel technology. But what makes it all the more intractable is that, whereas our capacity to act into the world is increasing without limit, with the consequence that we now find ouselves faced with new and unprecedented responsibilities, the ethical resources at our disposal are diminishing at the same pace. Why should this be? Because the same technological ambition that gives mankind such power to act upon the world also reduces mankind to the status of an object that can be fashioned and shaped at will; the conception of the mind as a machine?the very conception that allows us to imagine the possibility of (re)fabricating ourselves?prevents us from fulfilling these new responsibilities. Hence my profound pessimism. *6. Alcmena's Paradox* To pay Heinz von Foerster a final homage, I would like to conclude by recounting a very lovely and moving story he told me, one that has a direct bearing on the arguments developed here. The story takes place in Vienna toward the end of 1945, and it concerns another Viennese Jew, the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, whose celebrated book *Man's Search for Meaning* was to be published the following year*.* Frankl had just returned to Vienna, having miraculously survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp; in the meantime he had learned that his wife, his parents, his brother, and other members of his family had all been exterminated. He decided to resume his practice. Here, then, is the story as my friend Heinz told it: Concentration camps were the setting for many horrific stories. Imagine then the incredulous delight of a couple who returned to Vienna from two different camps to find each other alive. They were together for about six months, and then the wife died of an illness she had contracted in the camp. At this her husband lost heart completely, and fell into the deepest despair, from which none of his friends could rouse him, not even with the appeal "Imagine if she had died earlier and you had not been reunited!" Finally he was convinced to seek the help of Viktor Frankl, known for his ability to help the victims of the catastrophe. They met several times, conversed for many hours, and eventually one day Frankl said: "Let us assume God granted me the power to create a woman just like your wife: she would remember all your conversations, she would remember the jokes, she would remember every detail: you could not distinguish this woman from the wife you lost. Would you like me to do it?" The man kept silent for a while, then stood up and said, "No thank you, doctor!" They shook hands; the man left and started a new life. When I asked him about this astonishing and simple change, Frankl explained, "You see, Heinz, we see ourselves through the eyes of the other. When she died, he became blind. But when he *saw* that he was blind, he could see!"28 This, at least, is the lesson that von Foerster drew from this story?in typical cybernetic fashion. But I think that another lesson can be drawn from it, one that extends the first. What was it that this man suddenly saw, which he did not see before? The thought experiment that Frankl invited his patient to perform echoes one of the most famous Greek myths, that of Amphitryon. In order to seduce Amphitryon's wife, Alcmena, and to pass a night of love with her, Zeus assumes the form of Amphytryon. All through the night, Alcmena loves a man whose qualities are in every particular identical to those of her husband. The self-same description would apply equally to both. All the reasons that Alcmena has for loving Amphitryon are equally reasons for loving Zeus, who has the appearance of Amphitryon, for Zeus and Amphitryon can only be distinguished numerically: they are two rather than one. Yet it is Amphitryon whom Alcmena loves and not the god who has taken on his form. If one wishes to account for the emotion of love by appeal to arguments meant to justify it or to the qualities that lovers attribute to the objects of their love, what rational explanation can be given for that "something" which Amphitryon possesses, but that Zeus does not, and which explains why Alcmena loves only Amphitryon, and not Zeus?29 When we love somebody, we do not love a list of characteristics, even one that is sufficiently exhaustive to distinguish the person in question from anyone else. The most perfect *simulation* still fails to capture something, and it is this something that is the essence of love?this poor word that says everything and explains nothing. I very much fear that the spontaneous ontology of those who wish to set themselves up as the makers or re-creators of the world know nothing of the beings who inhabit it, only lists of characteristics. If the nanobiotechnological dream were ever to come true, what still today we call love would become incomprehensible. ------------------------------ * Endnotes * 1N. Katherine Hayles, *How we became posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics*, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1999. 2Jean-Pierre Dupuy, *L'essor de la premi?re cybern?tique (1943-1953*), Paris, Ecole Polytechnique, Cahiers du CREA*,* 7, 1985. 3Jean-Pierre Dupuy, *Aux origines des sciences cognitives*, Paris, La D?couverte, 1994. 4Jean-Pierre Dupuy, *The Mechanization of the Mind*, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000. A revised paperback edition is about to be published by the MIT Press under the title *On the Origins of Cognitive Science. The Mechanization of the Mind* (2008). 5This point is clearly established by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, *French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism*, trans. Mary H. S. Cattani, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. 6Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism" in *Basic Writings*, ed. David Farrell Krell, New York, Harper and Row, 1977, p. 225. 7This phrase is found in the review Sartre wrote in 1943 of Albert Camus's *The Stranger*, "Explications de *l'Etranger*", reprinted in Critiques litt?raires (*Situations I*), Paris, Gallimard, 1947; available in English in *Literary and Philosophical Essays*, trans. Annette Michelson, New York, Criterion Books, 1955. 8"To render philosophy inhuman" ? thus the task Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard set himself in 1984. 9This expression is borrowed from Steve Heims's indispensable book, *The Cybernetics Group*, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1991. 10Peter Sloterdijk, "On the Rules of the Human Fleet", a paper delivered at a conference on Heidegger at Elmau Castle, Upper Bavaria, on July 17, 1999, and presented as a reply to Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism." 11Louis Dumont, *Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective*, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986. 12See Jean-Pierre Dupuy, "Some Pitfalls in the Philosophical Foundations of Nanoethics," *Journal of Medicine and Philosophy* 32, no. 3 (2007): 237-261; Jean-Pierre Dupuy, "Complexity and Uncertainty: A Prudential Approach to Nanotechnology," in John Weckert et al., eds., *Nanoethics: Examining the Social Impact of Nanotechnology *(Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2007), 119-131; Jean-Pierre Dupuy, "The double language of science, and why it is so difficult to have a proper public debate about the nanotechnology program," Foreword to Fritz Allhoff and Patrick Lin, eds., *Nanoethics: Emerging Debates* (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008); and Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Alexei Grinbaum, "Living with Uncertainty: Toward a Normative Assessment of Nanotechnology," *Techn?* (joint issue with *Hyle)* 8, no. 2 (2004): 4-25. 13Mihail C. Roco and William Sims Bainbridge, *Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science* (Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation, 2002), 13. 14Damien Broderick, *The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed by Rapidly Advancing Technologies* (New York: Forge, 2001), 118. 15See Kevin Kelly, "Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity by 2100?", in *The Technium,* a work in progress, http://www.kk.org./thetechnium/. 16Hannah Arendt, *The Human Condition* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 231. 17Ibid., 2-3. 18G?nther Anders, *Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen: ?ber die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution*, vol. 1 (Munich: Beck, 1980), 21-97. 19Jean-Paul Sartre, *L'Existentialisme est un humanisme*, Paris, Nagel, 1946. 20Norbert Wiener, *God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion* (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1964), 12. 21Ibid., 13. 22The Ilulissat Statement, Kavli Futures Symposium, "The merging of bio and nano: towards cyborg cells," 11-15 June 2007, Ilulissat, Greenland. 23Carole Lartigue's JCVI team had succeeded in "simply" transferring the genome of one bacterium, *Mycoplasma mycoides,* to another, *Mycoplasma capricolum,* and showing that the cells of the recipient organism could function with the new genome. In effect, one species had been converted into another. 24See Philip Ball, "Meanings of 'life'," Editorial, *Nature* 447 (28 June 2007): 1031-1032. The sub-title is "Synthetic biology provides a welcome antidote to chronic vitalism." 25A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. 26Hannah Arendt, *Journal de pens?e (1950-1973), *2 vols., translated by Sylvie Courtine-Denamy (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 1. 27Henri Atlan, *Les ?tincelles du hasard,* vol. 1: *Connaissance spermatique* (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 45. 28Translated from the German ("Wir sehen uns mit den Augen des anderen.... Als er aber erkannte, da? er blind war, da konnte er sehen!"). See Heinz von Foerster, "Mit den Augen des anderen", in *Wissen und Gewissen. Versuch einer Br?cke*, S. J. Schmidt, ed., Frankfurt, 1993; 350-363. 29Monique Canto-Sperber, "Amour," in Monique Canto-Sperber, ed., *Dictionnaire d'?thique et de philosophie morale,* 4th edition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 41. * **[image: Separater]* *A paper prepared for the "Transhumanism and the Meanings of Progress" workshop, ASU, Tempe, AZ, April 24-25, 2008.** Published 2008.06.05 * *Comments:* Share your thoughts on this article: View / Add Comments (0) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Jun 12 13:58:28 2008 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:58:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Brains, Selves and Spirituality in the History of Cybernetics :: Andrew Pickering :: Global Spiral In-Reply-To: <22360fa10806120644y4b064fcej700c75e54401a299@mail.gmail.com> References: <22360fa10806120644y4b064fcej700c75e54401a299@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Here's an excellent opportunity for thoughtful, rational criticism and comment. [2 of 6] - Jef Brains, Selves and Spirituality in the History of Cybernetics :: Andrew Pickering :: Global Spiral Brains, Selves and Spirituality in the History of Cybernetics By Andrew Pickering *This essay is a revised version of a paper presented at the Max Planck Institute for History of science, Berlin, 3 November 2007.* I [image: bubbles]I was pleased to be invited to this meeting?I knew almost nothing about transhumanism when I got the invitation, and thinking about it seemed like an interesting challenge. I had intended to write a paper just for the meeting, somehow the time evaporated (my return to England) so I sent along a recent paper deriving from my research into the history of cybernetics that touches on some relevant issues, I think, and in these remarks I'll try to join up a few dots. First remark: if transhumanism didn't exist it would be necessary to invent it. The aspiration to transcend the human form does a wonderful job in inviting the numinous question: what does it mean to be human? Or as Don Ihde put it, "of which human are we trans?" So that is the question that I want to dwell on?what does it mean to be human? And the best way I've found to proceed is to contrast the answer that I'm inclined to give, based on my analyses of scientific practice and my more recent work on the history of cybernetics, with the answer offered by the transhumanists. Immediately we run into a problem?I think the transhumanists might not have a single agreed position. So for the purpose of exposition I'll narrow my definition of transhumanism down to the goal of 'cybernetic immortality' as a sort of defining outer limit of transhumanist thought. So, what is cybernetic immortality? I take it be the idea that we can achieve a sort of immortality by downloading (or uploading) our consciousness into a computer (and then it can move around from machine to machine forever). What can we say about this idea? First, it exemplifies the transhuman aspiration very nicely?it envisages shuffling off the material form of the human body entirely. Second, it answers the question "what does it mean to be human" very clearly. A certain timeless *essence* of humanity?consciousness, the mind?is to achieve immortality, with all the useless paraphernalia of humanity?the body, even the unconscious and subconscious reaches of the mind?to be sloughed off. How might we react to this version of what it means to be human? We could start by noting that there is something very odd about it. Its vision of the human essence is actually a historical construction, invented by the Enlightenment. Of course, you might like the Enlightenment and you might want to make its privileging of the mind and reason a permanent feature of humanity, as in cybernetic immortality. However, it's worth noting that what is envisaged here is a *freezing* and a *narrowing* of the human form?the imposition of a historically specific definition rather than the liberation of an eternal essence. Actually, it's this impulse towards freezing that worries me most about transhumanism. As I move towards my own work, a few more thoughts spring to mind. In my book *The Mangle of Practice*:* Time, Agency, and Science* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) I was led to emphasize two aspects of being in the world: what I called a *posthumanist* entanglement of the human and the nonhuman, and temporal *emergence*: the continual bubbling up of irreducible novelty in the world. My sense of 'posthumanism' is thus more or less the inverse of how the same word is used in connection with transhumanism. The latter refers to a splitting off of consciousness from materiality, whereas I want to argue for a decentered analysis that foregounds the constitutive coupling of consciousness, reason, the self, etc with the material world. Where does this divergence leave us? I'm inclined to stick to my story, but that doesn't mean I have to regard cybernetic immortality as a totally mistaken idea. Presumably even downloaded consciousnesses would have something to interact with?the material world via some sort of motor organs, or just each other?so, oddly, a decentered posthumanist analysis, in my sense, would still go through. These disembodied consciousnesses would still be constitutively plugged into the world as we are, but *differently*?not through the medium of the fleshly body. This, of course, raises the question of whether the medium of being matters. And this, in turn, is the sort of question that phenomenologists like to meditate on, so maybe I should leave it for Don Ihde to answer. However for myself, I have to say that, as mentioned in my paper, I'm taken by a very literal understanding of Michel Foucault's notion of *technologies of the self*. Different technologies, different material set-ups, indeed elicit different inner states. And I'm willing to bet that cybernetic immortality would entail some sort of technologies of the self, and that the selves they elicit would be very different from the selves we have today. And the moral of this is that even if transhumanists aim at the simple liberation of some timeless human essence, they would end up with something they did not expect?which again problematizes their version of what it means to be human. And, of course, we could have reached the same conclusion by thinking about emergence?we have to expect new selves to be continually bubbling up in our dealings with the material world, even dealings that aim to hold the self constant. I should think more now about this phrase, 'cybernetic immortality,' and I want to make a distinction concerning the referent of 'cybernetic.' The sense invoked by the transhumanists appeals to the information-theory branch of cybernetics, and more broadly to anything to do with AI and computers. This hangs together perfectly with the Enlightenment image of reason as the human essence. However, in *The Mangle* I argued that we can't get to grips even with Enlightenment science itself by focusing on reason alone. Instead we need to begin with *performance*?the idea that we humans are linked into the world via dances of agency, coupling our performances with those of the world. This emphasis on performance is a very different answer to the question of what it means to be human than the Enlightenment's, and, as it happens, there is a very different branch of cybernetics that stages and acts out this vision for us, the branch that flourished in Britain after the war, and that I talk about in my paper. And one interesting aspect of this difference is that it invites very different fantasies of immortality from Enlightenment cybernetics. This revolves around the biological computers that I mentioned in my paper below?meaning naturally occurring adaptive systems enrolled into human projects as performative brains. Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask imagined these as substitutes for human factory managers, and went so far as to devise ways to train them to function as such. The basic idea was that the human manager would monitor the performance of the adaptive system and somehow reinforce moves that he or she approved of, until the system achieved a level of performance that the human could live with?at which point the human could withdraw and leave the factory to be managed by a pond or some electrochemical threads or whatever. The simple point I want to make here is that after training one can regard the computer as a sort of *model* of the human manager, inheriting his or her performative competence?and I cannot see why one should not think of this as a species of genuinely cybernetic immortality: the key competence of the human would here be indeed downloaded, not into a digital machine but into some lively and adaptive nonhuman material. However, something very different from consciousness gets downloaded here, into a medium very different from a digital computer. Hence, we can see that very different modes of immortality are imaginable depending on what one thinks it means to be human. To put it another way, we can see more concretely through this example how current discussions of cybernetic immortality amount to a freezing and narrowing of the space of future possibilities. I would hate to see the Enlightenment story of humanity made irrevocably true by biotech and AI. I could say some more about my cyberneticians. If I wanted to persuade you to take them seriously, I would go on about their work in robotics, complex systems theory, management and so on?nice down to earth topics that Enlightenment thinkers can recognize?but one thing that interests me a lot about them is precisely that they had some unconventional ideas about the * self*, as discussed at some length in my paper. These follow immediately from the notion of the brain and the self as performative. The Enlightenment self is given and conscious?it's the kind of self that does IQ tests and that AI models?which is why academics can mistake it for an essence. The performative self, in contrast, is opaque to consciousness, the sort of thing one can *find out about* experimentally. And in my paper I show how in the history of cybernetics this sort of curiosity about the performative self has been entangled with all sorts of technologies of the self (including flickering strobe lights and hallucinogens, as well as meditation), and with associated altered states, explorations of consciousness, strange performances, magic, the *siddhis*, the decentered dissolution of the self, tantric yoga and union with the divine. The self, as revealed here, turns out to be inexhaustibly emergent, just like the world?the antithesis of the given human essence of the Enlightenment and cybernetic immortality. And again, for me, this shows the extent of the freezing and narrowing of the human that transhumanism entails?the severity of *its editing of what the human might be*. Of course, all of the practices and states that I talk about in my paper are already marginalized in contemporary society?it feels vaguely embarrassing to talk about them in public. But at least the margins exist, and one can go there if one likes. The transhumanists would like to engineer them out of existence entirely and forever. Yes, I'm starting not to like transhumanism. As an aside here I could state the obvious: that cybernetic investigations of the self lead straight into the space of the spiritual, though the immediate resonances and affiliations are with Eastern spirituality rather than Christianity. There is, of course, an important and distinctly Christian line of the critique of transhumanism that emphasizes a deep significance of death and resurrection that transhumanism skates over. However, it is worth emphasizing a certain isomorphism here of critique and criticized: both positions assume that they already know substantively what it means to be human. Both would like to freeze the human in place; neither acknowledges a significant space for emergence. From this spiritual angle, then, the mangle, cybernetics and Eastern spirituality all serve to thematize the narrowness of current debates both for and against transhumanism. "Who knows what a body can do?"?do we want to foreclose this question? Let me come at this topic from one last angle. Transhumanism has a *telos*: it thinks it can see the future and how to mobilize science and technology to get there. Clearly the mangle and cybernetics contest this idea. But I find it interesting to confront it historically, too. In a paper available on the web ('Facing the Challenges of Transhumanism: Philosophical, Religious, and Ethical Considerations'), Hava Tirosh-Samuelson credits the word 'transhumanism' to Julian Huxley in 1957, but traces the origins of the idea back to the 1920s and 1930s in the writings of J.B.S. Haldane, J.D. Bernal and Julian's brother, Aldous Huxley. I would be interested to know more about Haldane's and Bernal's thinking in this area, but I know something about Aldous and Julian Huxley from my work on cybernetics and the 1960s. Their writings are, for example, central to the present-day human potential movement, which focuses on precisely the sort of altered states and strange performances that I just mentioned as edited out of the transhumanist vision. The canonical recent text here would be Michael Murphy's enormous 1992 book, *The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature*. So there is a continuing, if marginal, tradition here of imagining an emergent rather than essentialized answer to the question of what it means to be human. It interests me that also back in the 1920s and 1930s one can find important works of fiction that point in the same direction. A couple of weeks ago I happened to read a canonical fantasy novel from the period, David Lindsay's *Voyage to Arcturus*, and in it Lindsay elaborates the idea of an unstable material and physical environment in which humanity continually develops entirely new limbs and sense organs. I also think of Olaf Stapledon's 1931 novel, *Last and First Men*. This sketches out an imaginary *longue dur?e* history of the future of the human race stretching over millions of years, in which humanity eventually seizes control of its own evolution, as the transhumanists would say. However, instead of freezing our form in the name of transhumanist perfection, we experiment with it. In the chapter that I remember best, the human race acquires wings and takes to the air, and Stapledon elaborates the posthumanist (in my sense) point brilliantly by conjuring up the changes in subjectivities and social relations that go along with the new aerial existence?flight as a technology of the self, producing a new kind of people. Why do I mention this now? For three reasons: First, because *Last and First Men* is a very nice example of the sort of vision of the future that might go with the mangle and cybernetics?a vision of open-ended experimentation, emergence and transformation with no fixed end. Second, because an interesting project in the history of ideas comes into sight here. I would like to know how it came to be that in the 20s and 30s people were able to imagine radical transformations of the human form, when no evident technological possibilities were at hand. And third, from the opposite angle, I am struck by the impoverishment of our imagination that has since come to pass. Now we have biotechnology, now we really could dream of equipping ourselves with wings or new senses, but we don't. Instead of experimentation with the endless possibilities of humanity, we dream transhumanist dreams of purification and the excision of what already exists, of downloading consciousness. Something profoundly sad has happened to our imagination. That, in the end, is what transhumanism brings home to me.1 II My research in the history of cybernetics in Britain has taken me to strange and unexpected places. Grey Walter's 1953 popular book, *The Living Brain*, is, on the one hand, a down-to-earth, materialist and evolutionary story of how the brain functions. I know how to deal with that. However, it is also full of references to dreams, visions, ESP, nirvana and the magical powers of the Eastern yogi, such as suspending the breath and the heartbeat?* siddhis* as they are called. I never knew what to make of this, except to note how strange it is and that respectable scientists don't write about such things now. But then I realized that I should pay attention to it. Walter was by no means alone on the wild side. All of the other cyberneticians were there with him. In his private notebooks Ross Ashby, the other great first-generation cybernetician in Britain, announced that intellectual honesty required him to be a spiritualist, that he despised the Christian image of God and that instead he had become a 'time worshipper.' Gordon Pask wrote supernatural detective stories. Stafford Beer was deeply absorbed by mystical number-systems and geometries, happily sketched out his version of the great chain of being, taught Tantric yoga and attributed magical powers like levitation to his fictional alter ego, the Wizard Prang. Echoing Aldous Huxley on mescaline, Gregory Bateson and R D Laing triangulated between Zen enlightenment, madness and ecstasy. Strange and wonderful, surprising stuff. What is going on here? I want to try to sort this out, and tie it back to a distinctive conception of the human brain.2 Meditating on the history of cybernetics has helped me see just how deeply modern thought is enmeshed in an endlessly repetitive discourse on *how special we are*, how *different* human beings are from animals and brute matter. It is, of course, traditional to blame Descartes for this *human exceptionalism*, as we might call it.3However, while we may no longer believe we have immortal and immaterial souls, the human sciences seem always to have been predicated on some immaterial equivalent that sets us apart: language, reason, emotions, culture, the social, the dreaded knowledge or information society in which are now said to live. This sort of master-narrative is so pervasive and taken for granted that it is hard to see, let alone to shake off and imagine our way out of. This is why we might learn from cybernetics. It stages a non-dualist vision of brains, selves and the world that might help us put the dualist human and physical sciences in their place and, more importantly, to see ourselves differently and to act differently. Let me talk about how this goes. We should start with the brain. The modern brain, as staged since the 1950s by AI for example, is cognitive, representational, deliberative?the locus of a certain version of human specialness. The key point to grasp is that the cybernetic brain *was not like that*. It was just another organ of the body, an organ that happens to be especially engaged with bodily *performance* in the world. In this sense, the human brain is no different from the animal brain except in mundane specifics: Ashby, for example, noted that we have more neurons and more neuronal interconnections than other species, making possible more nuanced forms of adaptation to the environment. And, of course, the defining activity of first-generation cybernetics was building little electromechanical models of the performative brain?Walter's tortoises and Ashby's homeostats?thus completing the effacement of difference between humans on the one side and animals, machines and brute matter on the other. This is what I like about cybernetics: it was and is nowhere in the Cartesian space of human exceptionalism. It reminds us that we are performative stuff in a performative world?and then elaborates fascinatingly on that. Now I want to try to make sense of some of these elaborations as they bear on non-Cartesian understandings of minds, selves and spirit. [image: tortoise] [image: homeostat] *pictures: tortoise & homeostat* *Altered States and Strange Performances* The Cartesian brain is available for introspection. We know our own special cognitive powers and feelings, and it is the job of AI, say, to reproduce those powers in a computer program. However, the performative brain is not like that. Walter's tortoises navigated their environments without representing them at all. In general, cybernetics understood performance as largely happening below the level of consciousness and as thus unavailable to inspection. Ashby's model for the performative brain was bodily processes of homeostasis?keeping the blood temperature constant?something that all mammals do, but not by thinking about it. This unavailability of the performative brain at once made it an object of *curiosity*?who knows what a performative brain can do? This simple curiosity in turn explains much, though by no means all, of the cyberneticians' travels in forbidden lands. If mainstream Western culture defines itself by a rejection of strange performances, well then, other cultures can be seen as a repository of possibilities, hence Walter's interest in nirvana and the yogic *siddhis*. He was happy to recognise that Eastern yogis have strange powers; he just wanted to give a naturalistic explanation of them in terms of the performative brain. The *siddhis* were thus, according to Walter, instances of disciplined conscious control of otherwise autonomic bodily functions; nirvana was the absence of thought in the achievement of perfect homeostasis?the disappearance of the last relic of the Cartesian mind. Beer thought differently. He practiced yoga; the *siddhis* were real to him, the incidental powers that arise on a spiritual journey. We can come back to spiritual matters in a minute. With the exception of Beer, *siddhis* and the like were matters of distant report to the cyberneticians, not personal experience, and another hallmark of early cybernetics was the pursuit of parallel phenomena that were accessible to Western means of investigation, hence the interest in ESP-phenomena. Hence, several of my cyberneticians belonged to the British Society for Psychical Research, as I recently found out. However, the key discovery in this respect was undoubtedly Walter's of *flicker*. In the course of EEG research in 1945, Walter and his colleagues discovered that gazing with eyes closed at a strobe light flickering near the alpha frequency of the brain induced visions: moving, coloured patterns, often geometrical ones but also visions of events like waking dreams. This flicker experience was important to the cyberneticians and psychical researchers precisely as a vindication of an understanding of the brain as performative and endlessly explorable rather than cognitive and immediately available. So a couple of comments are appropriate here. First, flicker vividly problematised any notion of the brain as an organ of representation. One indeed sees strange and beautiful patterns in a flicker set-up, but the patterns are equally obviously *not there* in the world. The strobe just flashes on and off, but the patterns move and spiral through space. Second, flicker thematizes a non-dualist coupling of the brain to the world. The brain does not choose to see moving patterns; the external environment elicits this behavior from the brain. To see what is going on here, I can't help thinking of Michel Foucault's idea of *technologies of the self*. In Foucault's own work, these are technologies that produce a distinctly human, self-controlled self?the kind of self that sets us apart from animals and things. Flicker, then, is a different kind of non-modern, non-Cartesian technology of self?a technology for *losing control* and going to unintended places, for *experiment* in a performative sense. Much of the literature in this area can be read as devoted to strange performances and the technologies of the self that elicit them. Aldous Huxley's second book on his mescaline experience, *Heaven and Hell* (1956), is one long catalogue of technologies for eliciting non-modern selves open to mystical experiences, including holding one's breath, chanting and flagellation as well as psychedelic drugs and, yes, flicker. What interests me most here, I think, is how drastically these technologies and their associated altered states undercut our notions of the modern self. They remind us that there are other ways to be; other selves that we can inhabit. They show vividly and by contrast, just how straitened the modern self is, and just how constrained the human sciences that celebrate the modern self are. *The Decentered Self** * We can think about another aspect of the cybernetic brain. I said that it was performative, and now I need to add that in the main line of cybernetic descent, the brain's role in performance was that of *adaptation*. The brain, above all the organs, is what helps us cope with the unknown and get along in a world that can always surprise us in its performance. Adaptation is an interesting concept in the present connection because it is intrinsically relational. One adapts to specific others as they appear, not to the world in general once and for all. This in turn implies a sort of * decentring* of the self that, again, cybernetic technologies of the self help stage for us. When Allen Ginsberg, the Beat poet, took LSD for the first time it was in conjunction with a feedback-controlled flicker set-up, and he afterwards wrote that he felt that his soul was being sucked away down the wires. So much for Descartes. We could move in several directions from here. One is into the arts. Gordon Pask constructed an original aesthetic theory based on the idea that human beings actually find pleasure and satisfaction in performative adaptation to others, human or nonhuman. In the early 1950s, his famous Musicolour machine was an instance of this. Musicolour translated a musical performance into a light show, but its defining feature was that its parameters evolved as a function of what had gone before, so that it was impossible to gain a cognitive overview of the linkage between sounds and lights. The performer thus had continually to adapt to the machine just as it adapted to him or her, and the overall performance was a dynamic and decentered joint product of the human and the nonhuman?literally a staging of the relational brain and self, now in the realm of the arts and entertainment. Here I could make two observations: The first is that here we can see clearly that what is at stake is not simply *ideas* about the brain and the self. Distinct and specific projects and forms of life hang together with these ideas?*different ways to live*. Again, this observation serves to thematize the straitened character of both the Cartesian self and the human sciences, now aesthetics, that conspire to naturalize these selves. The other observation is that the strangeness of Pask's work is manifest in the fact that no-one, not even Pask, was sure what a Musicolour machine was. He later wrote of trying 'to sell it in any possible way: at one extreme as a pure art form, at the other as an attachment for juke boxes.' Much the same could be said of the Beat writer and artist Brion Gysin's attempt to market flicker machines as a performative substitute for the living-room TV. [image: flicker] *picture: flicker -- gysin* Another direction in which we could travel is madness. Madness for the cyberneticians was just another of those altered states the performative brain could get into, as usual elicited by specific technologies of the self. Walter drove his robot tortoises mad by placing them in contradictory set-ups in which their conditioning pointed them to contradictory responses. He also cured them with other set-ups that he analogized to the brutal psychiatry of his day: shock, sleep therapy and lobotomy. Gregory Bateson refined this picture in his story of the double-bind as a contradictory social situation to which the symptoms of schizophrenia were an unfortunate adaptation. Here what interests me most is that at Kingsley Hall in the second half of the 1960s, R D Laing and his colleagues put this decentered and performative image of schizophrenia into practice, in a community in which psychiatrists and the mad (as well as artists and dancers) lived together on a par, rather than in the rigidly hierarchic relations of the traditional mental hospital. Kingsley Hall was another technology of the self?both an antidote to the double bind for sufferers, and, as Laing put it, a place where the mad could teach the sane to go mad?where new kinds of self could emerge. Again, Kingsley Hall makes the point that it is not just ideas that are at stake here, but other forms of life too. And something of the strangeness of this other form of life is caught up by the label * anti-psychiatry* that attached to the Bateson-Laing enterprise. A style of adaptive architecture, associated with the Archigram group as well as Cedric Price and Gordon Pask, likewise found itself described as *anti-architecture *. I find these links from the non-Cartesian performative and adaptive brain to these strange forms of life fascinating. The third axis we can explore under this heading is 'alternative spiritualities.' The decentering that goes with the adaptive brain of course pushes us in the direction of Eastern spirituality. Instead of the centered and unchangeable soul one finds a self that evolves and becomes in the thick of things, and this just is a Buddhist analysis of the self. One can plunge into this further. Here is a diagram drawn by Gordon Pask in connection with his work on cybernetic machines for entertainment and education. It is labeled 'two views of minds and media.' Both views are decentered, focusing on the relationality of communication. One diagram enshrines a conventional view of this process and shows minds communicating with one another through some medium?words traveling through the air, say. But Pask wrote that 'I have a hankering' for the other view, in which minds are somehow 'embedded' in an all-pervasive communicational medium. [image: minds] [image: media] *diagrams: minds and media (1977)* These diagrams seem quite innocuous unless one immerses oneself in the sort of scientific/spiritual literature found in the *Journal of the Society for Psychical Research*, when the occult significance of diagram (b) becomes clear. The idea behind diagram (b) is that the brain is the organ of a strange sense, unrecognized in the West, capable of accessing some other, non-human and intrinsically spiritual realm that one may as well call 'universal mind.' One finds this idea in Ashby's notebooks from the early 1930s. In the passage where he admits to himself that he should be a spiritualist, he sketches out precisely the idea of the brain as a sort of hyper-sensitive (by virtue of its material complexity) radio receiver, uniquely open to signals in a spiritual aether. Over the years, one finds this image endlessly elaborated in attempts to understand phenomena like ESP, which become much more plausible if they have their own medium in which to happen, and in the ideas of 'evolutionary consciousness' which one finds in important branches of New Age philosophy. If Pask's diagram of minds and media remains philosophical and representational, Aldous Huxley made a different connection to the spiritual realm in making sense of his mescaline experience. In the beautiful description of the phenomenology of psychedelic drugs that he gave in *The Doors of Perception*, Huxley appealed to Buddhist imagery to convey the intensity of his experiences?seeing the Dharma-body of the Buddha in the hedge at the bottom of the garden is the image that sticks in my mind. So here the altered states induced by chemical technologies of the non-modern self are immediately identified with those other altered states induced by Buddhist and more generally mystical technologies of the self. Interestingly, Huxley even offers an explanation of why mystical experiences are so rare in terms of the key concept of cybernetics, adaptation. His famous theory of the brain as a 'reducing valve' elaborates the idea that evolutionary processes have set us up to perceive the world in directly functional and performative terms. Mescaline and other technologies of the self then serve to undo this focused and performative stance, at least for a while, allowing us to latch onto the world in other ways. Finally, I can just note that the references so far to *siddhis* and strange performances point directly not just to Eastern philosophy but also to Eastern spiritual practices?to non-modern technologies of the self again. If you really want to know about *siddhis*, a place to start is with Mircea Eliade's big book, *Yoga: Immortality and Freedom* (1958). This intensely scholarly tome surveys the history and substance of the whole range of Indian yogic traditions, and singles out *tantric *yoga as the form that emphasized bodily techniques, altered states and strange performances?the * siddhis*?as well as magic and alchemy. Stafford Beer, as I said, practised and taught tantric yoga?he lived all this stuff. In all these ways, then, the adaptive brain of cybernetics extended into a distinctly and integrally spiritualized set of understandings and forms of life, running from psychedelic explorations of consciousness to strange yogic performances. The oddity of it all against the backdrop of, say, mainstream contemporary Christianity, is manifest. Again, we are reminded of the straitened and impoverished conceptions of the self and the spirit that the modern West affords us, and that we act out in our daily lives, and of the complicity of the modern social and human sciences in this narrowing and constriction of thought and action. *Hylozoism* So far I have been dwelling on cybernetics as a science of the performative brain, in contrast to the more familiar cognitive version. Now I should recognize that the cyberneticians did not deny the brain its cognitive capacity. Rather, they wanted *to put cognition in its place*. Like me in *The Mangle of Practice*, they argued for a *performative epistemology* in which knowledge and representation are seen as intimately engaged in performance, as revisable components of performance, having to do with getting along better or worse in the world, rather than as something especially human and having to do with making accurate maps and winning arguments. Beyond that, however, the cybernetic focus on the adaptive brain?the brain that helps us get along with the unknown and unknowable?in turn thematized what one might call the *performative excess* of the world in relation to our cognitive capacity?precisely the ability of the world always to surprise us with novel behavior. This explicit recognition of the performative excess of the world feeds into my last topic, which I refer to by the slippery word *hylozoism*. Hylozoism, for me, refers to a kind of spiritually charged wonder at the performativity and agency of matter, and Stafford Beer was certainly a hylozoist under this definition. He wrote poems on the computational power of the Irish Sea as indefinitely exceeding our own. '*Nature* is (let it be clear that) *nature*is in charge' he wrote in 1977. What interests me most, again, is that this hylozoism was not just a philosophical position, an idea of what the world is like. Again, the cyberneticians elaborated it in all sorts of practices, including engineering and the arts. In modern engineering, the dominant approach is a version of what Martin Heidegger called *enframing*. The world is materially reformed and reconfigured to try to accomplish some preconceived goal according to a preconceived plan. Beer and Pask developed a quite different approach, that one could associate with *revealing*, not enframing?an open-ended exploratory approach of *finding out* what the world can offer us. Perhaps the best way to grasp this is via the notion that whatever one wants in the world, it's already there, somewhere in nature. I think here of the craziest and most visionary project I have ever come across in the history of technology, Beer and Pask's attempt to construct non-representational *biological computers*. The idea is simple enough once you see it. Ashby had argued for the idea of the brain as an organ of performative adaptation, and Beer stood this idea on its head: any adaptive system can function as a brain. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Beer and Pask then embarked on a long search through the space of adaptive systems running from pond ecosystems to electrochemically deposited metal threads as some sort of substitute for human factory managers.4 They failed, but the problem lay in getting adaptive systems to care about our projects rather than any difficulties of principle. Once more the contrast between this sort of hylozoist engineering and that taught in engineering schools is manifest; this time we would have to blame the modern natural sciences and IT strategies, rather than the social sciences, for conspiring with the narrowing of our imagination of the world itself against which biological computing stands out. We can see hylozoist parallels in the arts to this style of cybernetic engineering. Brian Eno said he was indebted to Stafford Beer's *Brain of the Firm* for innovative changes in his music in the 1970s. If classical music consists in the reproduction of a pre-conceptualised score, Eno's generative music consists, as he once put it, in 'riding the dynamics' of unpredictable algorithms and *finding out* what emerges, as if the music was already there, now in the domain of computational systems. In the realm of what used to be called sculpture, Garnet Hertz built a robot very similar to Grey Walter's tortoises, but with the electronics replaced by an optically and mechanically coupled giant Madagascan cockroach, and exhibited it as an art object. [image: roach robot]* * *picture: roach robot* The artist Eduardo Kac has done much the same with bio-robots and genetically modified animals, and Andy Gracie's artwork explores the dynamic possibilities of interfering with natural processes of growth and adaptation. My favorite example of hylozoist art, however, is biofeedback music. Developed by people like Alvin Lucier, biofeedback music consists in extracting naturally occurring electrical rhythms from the brain and using them to control sound-making equipment. Once more we arrive at the hylozoist idea that it's all already there in nature; there is no need for that long trip through the centuries of compositional development in the history of the West?all you need is a few electrodes and wires. And yet again, the strangeness of this sort of performance is evident. As James Tenney (1995, 12) put it: 'Before [the first performance of Lucier's *Music for a Solo Performer*] no one would have thought it necessary to define the word "music" in a way which allowed for such a manifestation; afterwards some definition could not be avoided.' [image: music] [image: biofeedback] *pictures: music for solo performer; john cage & biofeedback* It is also worth noting that biofeedback is historically related to Grey Walter's EEG research, and originated as a technique for interfering with one's own brainwaves. It was taken up in the 60s as a technique for achieving the same sort of transcendental inner states as meditation and psychedelic drugs, and performances of biofeedback music often entailed the achievement of such altered states by performers (individually or collectively) and the audience. So this new sort of music was directly performative as itself a technology of the self for achieving altered states and non-modern subject-positions.5 To wrap things up, I want to say that in elaborating a conception of the brain as adaptive and performative, the history of cybernetics dramatizes visions of the self and spirituality and the arts and engineering and the world, that go far beyond those prevalent in contemporary society and the mainstream sciences, and that cybernetics acted out those visions in all sorts of strange, surprising and wonderful projects. As I have said several times, I take it that this sort of ontological theatre points up the narrowness of our hegemonic forms of life and the role of the natural as well as the social sciences in closing down our imagination and naturalizing this constriction. *Endnotes* 1 There is, of course, no shortage of genres that circle around the *fear* of variations on the human form. Canonical works would have to include Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein* and HG Wells' *The Island of Dr Moreau*, but it seems to me that this genre really flourished after WWII and during the Cold War: endless American B-movies about mutants, John Wyndham's *Midwich Cuckoos*, Greg Bear and *Darwin's Radio* (though, as usual, Bear is more interesting, portraying the promise as well as the fear of the next stage of human evolution). 2 A much fuller treatment of the topics to follow (and much else) complete with citations to sources is to be found in my forthcoming book: *Sketches of Another Future: The Cybernetic Brain, 1940-2000* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). 3 The canonical transhumanist dream of downloading consciousness to a computer is, of course, a species of human exceptionalism writ very large. My idea here is to explore a different mode of being in the world and where it might lead us, especially across spiritual terrain. 4 There is a close resemblance between this idea of substituting biological computers for human managers and the transhumanist project of downloading human consciousness into a digital computer. The axis of differentiation, besides the very different substrates involved, is that what gains 'cybernetic immortality' in biological computing is not the conscious, reasoning brain of the manager but his or her preconscious, performative and adaptive capabilities. 5 There are many threads that one could follow in exploring the theme of hylozoism in the arts and science including the role of the camera obscura in the extreme realism of Vermeer's paintings (which apparently include reflections of the camera itself); Bernard Palissy's amazing techniques for turning living creatures into pottery; Pamela Smith's writings, which suggest that much of what is usually taken to be alchemical symbolism is actually a literal description of the mediaeval vermilion synthesis; Galison's account of the history of the bubble chamber, with C T R Wilson trying to create real meteorological phenomena in his early cloud chambers; and D'Arcy Thompson on the 19th-century science of inkdrops. * **[image: Separater]* *A paper prepared for the "Transhumanism and the Meanings of Progress" workshop, ASU, Tempe, AZ, April 24-25, 2008.** Published 2008.06.05 * *Comments:* Share your thoughts on this article: View / Add Comments (0) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jef at jefallbright.net Thu Jun 12 14:02:56 2008 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 07:02:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Engaging Transhumanism: The Meaning of Being Human :: Hava Tirosh-Samuelson :: Global Spiral In-Reply-To: <22360fa10806120623y50a1f150s5f4e8bc4ebe49a5@mail.gmail.com> References: <22360fa10806120623y50a1f150s5f4e8bc4ebe49a5@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Here's an excellent opportunity for thoughtful, rational criticism and comment. [6 of 6] - Jef Engaging Transhumanism: The Meaning of Being Human :: Hava Tirosh-Samuelson :: Global Spiral Engaging Transhumanism: The Meaning of Being Human By Hava Tirosh-Samuelson [image: Legs] In 2006, ASU received a generous grant from Metanexus Institute to examine the challenges of transhumanism. The term 'transhumanism' was coined by Julian Huxley (d. 1975), the grandson of the Victorian Darwinian, Thomas Henry Huxley. In *New Bottles for New Wine*, Julian Huxley, a humanist and evolutionary biologist, advocated the "Fulfillment Society," which will be committed to the full development of the human potential and will replace the Welfare Society, the Efficient Society, or the Power Society.1 For Huxley, 'transhumanism' was another word to discuss his belief in "evolutionary humanism," namely, the deliberate effort by mankind to "transcend itself ? not just sporadically ? but in its entirety, as humanity?. Man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature."2 Similar to the Human Potential Movement, Huxley believed that "the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Pekin man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny."3 In the last two decades this vision has become more plausible as a result of the confluence of new discoveries in the life sciences and the neurosciences and new technological developments in genomics, robotics, informatics and nanotechnology. Today the term 'transhumanism' denotes a cluster of futuristic scenarios in which science and technology will remediate the miseries of the human condition and usher in a new age in the evolution of humans, the posthuman age. For transhumanists (i.e., those who advocate the transitional steps humans need to take to reach the posthuman age), the human species is no more than a "work in progress:" Currently the human species is in a comparatively early phase of human evolution because humans are still enslaved to their genetic programming that destines them to experience pain, disease, stupidity, aging, and death. Bioengineering and genetic enhancement will bring about the posthuman age in which humans will live longer, will possess new physical and cognitive abilities, and will be liberated from suffering and pain due to aging and disease; moreover, humans will even conquer the ultimate enemy?death?by attaining "cognitive immortality," that is, the downloading of the human software (i.e., the mind) into artificially intelligent machines that will continue to exist long after the individual human has perished. The human/computer interface will be characteristic of the posthuman age in the following ways: large computer networks may emerge as superhumanly intelligent entities; computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent; and biological science will improve natural human intellect. This future state of affairs will be so unique that advocates call it "the singularity," namely, "a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules, a point that will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs until the notion becomes a commonplace." Whether transhumanists focus on human enhancement by design, or radical life extension, or on computer/human interface, the posthuman age is envisioned as the transcendence of current human biological limitations. In the posthuman future, humans will not be the product of evolution but the designers and controllers of the evolutionary process itself. Transhumanist ideas are gradually gaining adherents worldwide in print and especially on the internet. The World Transhumanist Association was founded in 1998 and today boasts several thousand members, although they are not in agreement about the meaning of transhumanism or its political goals. Like all new social and ideological movements, this organization is not free from internal debates, personal politics, and a sense of being embattled by external foes. Francis Fukuyama, for example, called transhumanism "the world's most dangerous idea,"5 and in response transhumanists have cultivated an acerbic, polemical style that ridicules their critics, dismissing them as "bio-Luddites" or "bio-Conservatives" and brushing them off with clever, but not very substantive, arguments.6 Although the pugnacious, irreverent style that characterizes the transhumanist discourse does not make engagement with these ideas easy, such engagement is necessary. It is my contention that even though transhumanism is not a significant social movement, the cultural forces that gave rise to the transhumanist vision are very significant and merit close examination. Transhumanism proposes a vision of and for humanity. Although that future is futuristic, it is rooted in the Enlightenment project and its faith in the progress of humanity due to science and technology. The "transhumanist manifesto" of Simon Young presents transhumanism as a philosophy, positioning it as an alternative to academic postmodernism, religious theism, and radical environmentalism. Against postmodernists of the academic Left, transhumanism denies cognitive skepticism, social constructivism, and cultural relativism. Objective reality does exist and is independent of human perception, cognition, and apprehension; science generates knowledge about objective reality, namely, accurate and true description of reality outside the human mind that provides humans with specific courses of actions, including those that change objective reality. The facts about the human condition are real and painful but need not be definitive. Biology is *not* destiny because the evolutionary process has given rise to the complex human brain that now enables humans to intervene in the evolutionary process and replace it with "designer evolution." Young argues that human consciousness is an "inevitable product of the evolutionary process" and the predictable outcome of "evolutionary complexification."7 Therefore, human beings not only *can *intervene and alter the biological facts through designer genes, designer drugs, and a whole range of enhancement technologies, humans *should* do so in order to improve the human species. The transhumanist scenario is decidedly optimistic as much as it is decidedly secular. In the transhumanist worldview there is no room for the God of traditional theism who created the world by will and intervenes in human affairs either through the revelation of the law or incarnation in the body of a human. A personal omniscient and omnipotent God is deemed intellectually unacceptable to transhumanists as much as it was for the Deists of the 18th century, and a creator God who intervenes in human affairs, reveals a law and instruction for behavior, or judges and rewards human deeds is deemed simply nonsensical since evolution has nothing to do with such a deity. For Young, evolution is the scientific truth, but it should be rendered as a selfish process ? la the "selfish gene" myth of Richard Dawkins, because evolution also has given rise to altruistic behavior and human ability to love. As an extension of humanism, transhumanism asserts the love of life, especially human life, and the desire to improve it through science and technology rather than religious instruction and moral edification. Placing the unlimited human potential (rather than the human as a currently lived experience) at the center of its outlook, transhumanism is also critical of contemporary environmentalism and its concern for respect toward other species and its resistance to massive human intervention in nature, through bioengineering of plants, heavy logging, industrial pollution, unrestricted consumerism, and many other undesirable activities. Dismissing any attempt to draw ethical conclusions from natural facts, as "the Naturalistic Fallacy," transhumanism does not take anything in nature to be sacred or especially worthy of preservation or conservation. To the extent that biology places restrictions on human freedom and the human built-in will to evolve, these obstacles should and must be removed. Only humans could transcend their biology because of the complexity of the human brain which has reached a level of complexity to a degree unknown in other animals. From a transhumanist perspective, radical environmentalism is misguided because it erases the moral differences between humans and other animals and because it invests nature with inherent moral values. The evolutionary process is not directionless but purposeful, life is not an accident but an evolutionary inevitability, and humanity is "not a twig on the bush of life, but the peak of evolutionary complexification on earth due to the incredible power of the human brain."8 Actualizing this remarkable potential through science and technology will enhance human freedom and release humanity from the bondage of biology. Given the transhumanist assault on the notion of human nature, the faculty seminar at ASU devoted the first year of the Templeton Research Lectures to examining transhumanism in light of the science of evolutionary psychology. Contrary to transhumanists, who consider human nature malleable, evolutionary psychologists hold that human nature is largely fixed because it is a product of a long evolutionary process. The Templeton Co-Fellows, Leda Cosmides (UC-Santa Barbara) and John Tooby (UC-Santa Barbara), seriously challenged transhumanism by arguing that human behavioral traits reflect the architecture of the human mind, which is designed to perform very specific functions. Evolutionary psychology makes a strong case that human nature is not malleable as transhumanists claim and warns us against facile optimism or the temptation to tinker with the human mind. Throughout the deliberations of the first year, the consensus emerged that we should direct our attention to transhumanism as a social movement, to the forces that gave rise to it and to the philosophical, cultural, and social implications of the transhumanist vision. The second year of the Templeton Research Lectures focused on cultural implications of current accelerated technologies and viewed them historically, socially, and politically. The public lectures of the Temple Co-Fellows, Braden Allenby (ASU) and Daniel Sarewitz (ASU) highlighted the novelty of the Age of the Anthropocene (Age of the Human) in which the human has become a design space and explored the meaning of the transhumanist notion of designing "better" human beings. What does it mean to be an enhanced individual or an enhanced society? These are social, political, and cultural questions which scientists are not addressing, while the application of enhancement technoligies takes place in the military. This special issue of the *Global Spiral* consists of five presentations delivered at a workshop at ASU on April 24-25, 2008. In this workshop, transhumanism was engaged by a philosopher of science and technology trained in the phenomenological tradition (Don Ihde); a sociologist, cognitive scientist, and cultural critic (Jean-Pierre Dupuy); a literary critic (Katherine Hayles); a philosopher and sociologist of science (Andrew Pickering); and a Christian theologian (Ted Peters). Engaging transhumanism from different perspectives, some more critically than others, the contributors agree that transhumanism merits a serious examination rather than cursory dismissal. To properly assess transhumanism, it must be situated historically and culturally and interrogated philosophically and theologically. Transhumanism will not go away but in all likelihood will continue to attract new adherents. Hence, it is incumbent on those who care about the place of science and technology in contemporary culture to examine transhumanism without adopting the polemical style of the transhumanist movement because what is at stake is the very meaning of human life in the foreseeable future. The special issue of the *Global Spiral* opens with Don Ihde's essay. Ihde argues that to understand transhumanism correctly we need to examine it as a kind of fantasy, and even a "kind of magic to fulfill the desire-fantasy," and remember that the particular form of any fantasy is always shaped by "textual patters of historical lifeworlds." Technofantasy is magical thinking that "disregards the ambiguous, non-neutral character of actual technologies." Ihde examines four influential narratives, as examples of "idols" that humans have created: "Intelligent Design," "The Cyborg," "Prediction," and "John Henry and Big Blue." His analysis of these narratives concluded that we do not need to fear the fantasized replacement of humans by machines. Rather, we need to understand how "the changing technologies with which we interact, form collectives, experience the dances of agencies, do forecast vastly changed conditions of work and play and even love." In this analysis, what matters is not the conflict between machines and humans but the myriads ways in which the actual presence of technology will transform human life and the meaning of being human. The following essay by Jean Pierre Dupuy, "Cybernetics is an Antihumanism: Advanced Technologies and the Rebellion against the Human Condition," offers a much more critical perspective of contemporary technology, especially cybernetics. Dupuy argues that "cybernetics, far from being the apotheosis of Cartesian humanism, as Heidegger supposed, actually represented a crucial moment in its demystification, and indeed its deconstruction." In fact, "cybernetics constitutes a decisive step in the rise of antihumanism." Contrary to the Anglo-Speaking world, Continental political philosophy has yet to acknowledge the notion of posthumanism, and instead has debated at length the notion of antihumanism. Dupuy explores possible connections between "posthumanism" and "antihumanism" in order to bridge the gap between Continental and Anglo-American philosophy. Dupuy joins other philosophers who are committed to "defend humanism (i.e., the values proper to the human person) from the excesses of science and technology." Dupuy begins his analysis with a critique of Heidegger who indicted humanism and suggests that in countries such as France, where Heideggerian thought has been influential, "it became impossible to defend human values against the claims of science." In fact, the human sciences for the past four decades have actually celebrated "the death of man" (namely metaphysical humanism, characteristic of pre-Heideggerian thought). In France, Structuralists not only followed Sartre in identifying "the inhuman" with "the mechanical," but actually championed the inhuman in their search for subject-less cognition. Cognition without a subject was precisely what cybernetics was all about since its inception in the 1940s. The key question is: "Was cybernetics the height of metaphysical humanism, as Heidegger maintained, or was it the height of its deconstruction, as certain of Heidegger's followers believe?" Dupuy answers that "cybernetics was both things at once and that is what made it not only the root of cognitive science, which finds itself faced with the same paradox, but also a turning point in the history of human conceptions of humanity." In the second part of his paper, Dupuy discusses the connection between the mechanization of the mind and the mechanization of life, and noted that the paradox of cybernetics continues today in the paradox that plagues cognitive science: "the mind has been raised up as a demigod in relation to itself." The third part of the paper considers nanotehcnology and its dream of designing the human by tinkering with biological evolution. Reiterating Hannah Arendt's prescient critique of modern science, as a revolt against the mortality of the human condition, Dupuy suggests that at the heart of the nanotechnological dream there is an extraordinary paradox that arises from "the convergence of opposites whereby the overwhelming ambition and pride of a certain scientific humanism leads directly to the obsolescence of mankind." Dupuy offers a rather pessimistic analysis of converging technologies and their challenges to the core of being human, namely, the ability to love. ** The third paper in this issue is by Katherine Hayles, a literary and media critic who has written extensively on transhumanism as expressed in cyberspace and in science fiction.9 Hayles notes the growth of transhumanism since she wrote the book, *How We Became Posthuman*, in 1999 and pointed out that all the forms of transhumanism "perform decontextualizing moves that over-simplify the situation and carry into the new millennium some of the most questionable aspects of capitalist ideology." The basic assumption of transhumanism is that "technology is involved in a spiraling dynamic of co-evolution with human development," an assumption known as "technogenesis." According to Hayles, this assumption is "compelling and indeed virtually irrefutable, applying not only to contemporary humans but to Homo sapiens across the eons, shaping the species biologically, psychologically, socially and economically." While Hayles finds herself in disagreement with transhumanist rhetoric, she also stated that the transhumanist community makes a positive contribution because it tries "to figure out where technogenesis is headed in the contemporary era and what it implies about our human future." Thus transhumanism confronts valuable questions, even though one does not have to accept all the implications of transhumanism claims. As a literary scholar, Hayles poses science fiction and speculative fiction as the *locus classicus* for reframing transhumanist questions. She observes that reproduction is a center of transhumanist concerns (e.g., "reproduction of individuals through children, reproduction of species through technology as well as biology, and reproduction of psychological, philosophical, social and economic institutions that facilitate and/or threaten the continued existence of humans as a species"). Whereas reproduction implies continuity, transhumanists (beginning with Vernon Vinge and even more so Ray Kurzweil) are obsessed with "singularity," a radical form of discontinuity. After summarizing the utopian rhetoric of transhumanists such as Max More and Nick Bostrom, Hayles claimed that "reproduction typically figures in transhumanist rhetoric as the reproduction of the individual through cloning, cryogenic suspension, radical life extension, and uploading human consciousness into a computer," all of which assume that "the individual will maintain his identity intact." She examines various fantastic scenarios in the novels of Greg Bear, Nancy Kress, James Patrick Kelly, and Philip K. Dick, among others, and concluded that science fiction writers enact a critique of transhumanism, even though they do not go as far as Fukuyama to view transhumanism as "the world's most dangerous idea." Rather, science fiction writers appreciate the complexity of the future "when advanced technologies come together with reproduction to reconfigure metalogical dynamics at every level, from the individual to the family to the nation-state and globalized society" and unlike the rhetoric of transhumanism, they know that it is impossible to predict accurately all the consequences of these developments using reason, technology and science. Although transhumanism is a transnational movement, it has particular roots in England. Andrew Pickering's paper, "Brains, Selves and Spirituality in the History of Cybernetics" is based on his new research on the history of cybernetics in England that focuses on Ross Ashby, Gordon Pask, Grey Walters, Stafford Beer, and others. Cybernetics is most relevant to reflections about the meaning of being human because "it stages a non-dualist vision of brains, selves and the world." Pickering considers that vision to be not only a definitive refutation of any discussion of human exceptionalism, but also a critique of the continued tendency to assume some immaterial factor that distinguishes humans from animals and from brute matter (language, reason, emotions, culture, the social, information, etc.). In regard to the human brain, cybernetics has challenged human exceptionalism and has shown that the brain is "just another organ of the body, an organ that happens to be especially engaged with bodily performance in the world." Unlike Foucault's "technologies of self" that produced a distinctly human self-controlled self, the work of British cybernetics in the mid 1940s actually problematized the notion that the brain is an organ of representation and offered instead "a technology for losing control and going to unintended places of experiment in a performative sense." These experiments offered not only ideas about the brain and the self but "different ways to live." Madness was another direction in which cyberneticians experimented with altered states the performative brain could get into when elicited by specific technologies of the self. Pickering finds "the links from the non-Cartesian performative and adaptive brain to these strange forms of life fascinating." Another very suggestive trajectory is offered by Eastern spirituality. The Buddhist analysis of the self offers an alternative to the centered and unchangeable soul. Some of the cyberneticians already in the 1930s recognized that the brain is the organ of a strange sense, capable of accessing some other, non-human and intrinsically spiritual realm, i.e., a universal mind. In contrast to these notions, the conception of the self and spirit in the modern Christian West seems to Pickering as "straitened and impoverished." The final notion Pickering finds in cybernetics is summarized in the term 'hylozoism' namely "a kind of spiritually charged wonder at the performativity and agency of matter." The cyberneticians Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask in the 1950s and 1960s "embarked on a long search through the space of adaptive systems running from pond ecosystems to electrochemically deposited metal threads as some sort of substitute for human factor managers." Their work failed to produce the intended result but had enormous impact on music and art during the 1970s. Pickering concluded that in comparison to the cyberneticians of previous decades, transhumanism seems to exhibit a lack of creative imagination. This issue of the *Global Spiral* concludes with the paper of Ted Peters, "Transhumanism and the Posthuman Future: Will Technological Progress Get us There?" that examines the transhumanist assumption that "progress, understood as betterment over time, is inherent in nature and inherent in culture." Offering a Christian (especially Lutheran) perspective, Peters argued that transhumanism offers a futurist thinking that relies on growth or progress, as opposed to Christian futurist thinking that "anticipates the advent of the new." Peters' thesis is "that transhumanist assumptions regarding progress are na?ve, because they fail to operate with an anthropology that is realistic regarding the human proclivity to turn good into evil. He called on researchers in genetics and nanotechnology to proceed "toward developing new and enhancing technologies" while maintaining "constant watchfulness for ways in which these technologies can become perverted and bent toward destructive purposes." Contrary to the prevailing assumption that biblical theology offers resistance to change, Peters demonstrates that the Bible anticipates the new, looks forward to transformation, and celebrates innovation. His theological critique of transhumanism is centered on the claim that it is na?ve to think that "we could accomplish with technology a transformation that can be achieved only by the eschatological act of a gracious and loving God." For Peters, transhumanism is more than a social movement or an ideology. Rather it is a philosophical system, a worldview that operates on three levels: metaphysical, psychological, and ethical. Echoing Simon Young, the author of the book mentioned above who is also a son of a known cybernetician in England, Peters states the goal of transhumanist philosophy as replacing "the Darwinian Evolution with Designer Evolution?from slavery to the selfish genes to conscious self-rule by the human mind." In this Promethean project, the future will differ from the past and the *Homo sapiens* will be replaced by *Homo cyberneticus*: "as humanism freed us from the chains of superstition, let transhumanism free us from our biological chains," chimes Simon Young. In this scenario, the immortalized species will set out for the stars. Conscious life will gradually spread throughout the galaxy "until finally, in the unimaginatively distant future, the whole universe has come alive, awakened to its own nature?a cosmic mind become conscious of itself as a living entity?omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent." Peters discusses Ray Kurzweil's futurist understanding of "singularity", showing it to conflate biological evolution and technological progress, seeing the latter as an extension of the former. Assuming a built-in entelechy, Kurzweil presents his vision as inevitable. Technological utopia envisioned by humanism is also supposed to free us from the ecological challenges ahead and to deliver social progress and ecological harmony, and Aubrey de Grey's program of radical life extension is the extension of the transhumanist battle against biology to death itself.10 Peters examines the ethical dimension of the transhumanist vision and poses the question "should a transhumanist ethic place us totally at the beck and call of every proposal for technological progress?" The existence of computer viruses show how na?ve and overly optimistic the transhumanist vision truly is, and the same can be said for transhumanist trust in the free market as a protection from evil. Looking at transhumanism from a critical, religious perspective, Peters (similar to the observations of Dupuy) noted that its vision is based on a paradox: "On the one hand, transhumanists propose a technology that will enhance our humanism, at least the intelligent aspect of humanity. On the other hand, once technology takes over and replicates itself, it will leave our present stage of humanity in the evolutionary dust. An emerging posthumanity will replace us." Peters concludes his paper with an extended critique of transhumanism inspired by the Lutheran theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his disciple, Langdon Gilkey, highlighting the human propensity to sin and the inherent limitations of being human. It is not technology that can save humans from their limitations, but only divine grace. The essays presented in this special issue should inspire rigorous engagement with transhumanism, precisely because it offers a negative view of human embodied biological existence and an optimistic fantasy that these limitations could be overcome through technology. If one accepts that transhumanism is more than an ideology, indeed a philosophy, one must look carefully at its understanding of the human, of biology, and of the relationship between technology and culture. Is transhumanism an extension of Enlightenment humanism or a negation of it? Is transhumanism an ideology, a philosophy, or even a religion (albeit loosely defined)? Is transhumanism's vision for the transcendence of biology a celebration of humanity or denigration of it? Is transhumanism a response to postmodernism or a product thereof? To engage transhumanism is to reflect on the meaning of being human in light of accelerated technologies and scientific advances. With its generous grant to ASU, Metanexus Institute has facilitated such examination and with the publication of this special issue of the Global Spiral, the online publication of Metanexus, further discussion of who we are and how we want to live will become possible. *Endnotes* 1 Juliann Huxley, *New Bottles for New Wine *(London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), 13-17. 2 Ibid, 17. 3 Ibid. 4 Vernon Vinge, "Technological Singularity," available on http://www-rohan.sdsy.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/WER2.html. Cf., Ray Kurzweil, The Singluarity is Near (When Humans Tarnscend Biology (London: Viking, 2005). 5 Francis Fukuyama, *Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotehcnological Revolution* (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002). 6 Best examples of transhumanist polemics are James Hughes, *Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future*(Boston: Westview Press, 2004) and Simon Young, *Designer Evolution: A Transhumanist Manifesto* (Boston, Prometheus Books, 2006). 7 *Designer Evolution*, 212. 8 Ibid, 209. 9 Katherine Hayles, *How We Became Posthuman:* *Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics *(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 10 The most vocal proponent of this interpretation of radical life extension is Aubrey de Grey, *Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs that Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime* (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007). * **[image: Separater]* *A paper prepared for the "Transhumanism and the Meanings of Progress" workshop, ASU, Tempe, AZ, April 24-25, 2008.** Published 2008.06.05 * *Comments:* Share your thoughts on this article: View / Add Comments (0) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Jun 12 14:38:30 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 07:38:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Tommy Emmanuel References: <200806120351.m5C3pAPP023749@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <019b01c8cc9a$a21a1f70$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Spike writes >> Damien Broderick > ... >> Subject: Re: [ExI] Tommy Emmanuel >> Another fine Australian! :) > > Whaaaat? Do I detect a hint of national pride? From our own Damien? Relax, it's perfectly okay to have national pride and even patriotism, so long as your not a superpower. Then it comes across either as boasting, arrogance, or even jingoistic. Suppose that some Russian in 1962 referred all the time to the accomplishments of some national. "Ah, I see Russian win this nobel prize too :-) " Hmm. That's not so bad, actually. Well, okay, I guess I should have said "Western superpower". Think about how the nobel prize sentence works if an Englishman, a German, or a Frenchman says it. And jesus, what if it were said by an American??? Who already get so many nobel prizes? And what if some Jew were to say it!? They're always getting them, so it would come off very badly. Very interesting---perhaps the main factor is the power, influence, or size of a group (Sorry to take every damn thing anyone says and *analyse* it, but it's what I do.) > Indeed, Tommy Emmanuel does magic on > that guitar. Australia and planet earth may > unapologetically take pride in him. Doesn't quite work either, I'm afraid. Now it *would* work if Earth was a relatively small or relatively less significant planet where the big guys were always getting the honors. Lee From kanzure at gmail.com Thu Jun 12 14:59:44 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:59:44 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Wrestling with Transhumanism :: Katherine Hayles :: Global Spiral In-Reply-To: References: <22360fa10806120642v12872db6pe4559f92021c3cf4@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200806120959.45034.kanzure@gmail.com> On Thursday 12 June 2008, Jef Allbright wrote: > Wrestling with Transhumanism :: Katherine Hayles :: Global > SpiralkinSrc=%5bG%5dSkins%2f_default%2fNo+Skin&ContainerSrc=%5bG%5dContainer >s%2f_default%2fNo+Container> > > Wrestling with Transhumanism > By Katherine Hayles > > > There are, of course, many versions of transhumanism, and they do not > all depend on the assumption I critiqued. But all of them, I will > argue, perform decontextualizing moves that over-simplify the > situation and carry into the new millennium some of the most > questionable aspects of capitalist ideology. Why then is http://heybryan.org/fernhout/ for commentary on that. > psychologically, socially and economically. While I have serious > disagreements with most transhumanist rhetoric, the transhumanist > community is one that is fervently involved in trying to figure out > where technogenesis is headed in the contemporary era and what it > implies about our human future. This is its positive contribution, > and from my point of view, why it is worth worrying about. It's not worth worrying about. The idea is to build it and do it, to take up the hammer and nail (ok, slightly more machinery than that is necessary) and build the technologies. But this isn't always as simple as having a hammer and nail laying around; we're working on this. > How can we extract the valuable questions transhumanism confronts > without accepting all the implications of transhumanist claims? One > possibility is to embed transhumanist ideas in deep, rich, and > challenging > contextualizations that re-introduce the complexities it strips away. Arguably it doesn't strip away questions, and rather the so-called prominent speakers that you cite, are the ones that are stripping it away. > The results re-frame the questions, leading to conclusions very > different than those most transhumanists embrace. In these > encounters, transhumanism serves as the catalyst?or better, the > irritant?that stimulates a more considered and responsible view of > the future than it itself can generate. You're talking as if it's some monocomponent entity or something, rather than a community project, which is the truth of the matter. There's always people, there's no main head. > As a literary scholar, I consider the *locus classicus* for > re-framing transhumanist questions to be science fiction and > speculative fiction, jointly signified by SF. To initiate my inquiry, > I will focus on the critical area of reproduction?reproduction of > individuals through children, reproduction of the species through > technology as well as biology, and reproduction of psychological, > philosophical, social and economic institutions that facilitate > and/or threaten the continued existence of humans as a species. To So, if you are interested in the continued existence of humans, then why not work on the multiply redundant concepts of backups and stored DNA and people in space habitats and so on? The institutions themselves aren't going to be able to track down all of those and eliminate them if they wanted to. You need to be proactive if you are truly concerned about the 'continued existence' of these genotypes, phenotypes, brains and personalities. It's not as simple as writing about preventing some points of view from developing, but instead go build the space habitats and space capsules or whatever, go launch them and make sure it works. Let's get it done. :) > see why reproduction is at the center of transhumanist concerns, we > need only consider the rhetoric of the "singularity," a term > introduced by SF writer and mathematician Vernon Vinge to indicate a > decisive break in which advanced technology catapults us into a > future qualitatively different from all previous human experience. > Within a few years, Vinge predicts, we will confront a change > comparable to the rise of life on earth; "the precise cause of this > change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with > greater than human > intelligence." There's also the idea of exponential growth that is the equivalent of a singularity. But this might be seen as a sort of intelligence anyway. > simultaneously acting as a privileged site for visions of radical > ruptures and transformations. Reproduction, then, is where the rubber > hits the road?where issues of what will change and what will endure > are imagined, performed, and contested. Privileged site? Maybe some people assume that, but it's really just an issue of making it happen and making sure things go smoothly, not so much an issue of "he who supports x y and z will become a king" and other nonsense. I don't see any indication of those assumptions in the communities, documents, books, etc. > Before demonstrating that SF re-contextualizes crucial issues > surrounding reproduction, I will find it useful to review briefly the > ideologies implicit in transhumanist rhetoric. Transhumanism, > sometimes signified by dedicated to the proposition that contemporary technosciences can > enhance human capabilities and ameliorate or eliminate such > traditional verities as mortality. It holds that human evolution is > incomplete and, moreover, that we have a responsibility to further > our evolution through technology. As a sample of transhumanist > rhetoric, consider the following passage from Max More, a prominent > movement spokesperson: It is terribly, terribly ironic to cite Max More exactly after the nonsense regarding 'human species evolution'. Max and those subjects do not go together. Wrong pairing. > Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University and one of > transhumanism's more thoughtful practitioners, gives a two-fold More thoughtful? According to who?? > definition on the World Transhumanist Association website: > > (1) The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the > possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human > condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making So, the distinction is the human condition: it's not "Overall" but the *personal* human condition. Nobody is talking about marching around and stabbing people in the back and making them enhanced or something silly like that. It's the personal human condition, not anything about vague generalities across the entire human population, and frankly that's verging on eugenics. http://heybryan.org/transhumanism_def.html Nick has yet to comment, I might add. > As these examples illustrate, transhumanist rhetoric concentrates on > individual transcendence; at transhumanist websites, articles, and > books, there is a conspicuous absence of considering socioeconomic > dynamics beyond the individual. Bostrom, for example, writes of > "making widely available technologies to eliminate ageing," but what > this would do to population growth, limited resources, and the > economics of the young supporting the old are not considered. Yes, population growth will explode. That's the idea of exponential growth. Resources aren't that limited, really. Look at the galaxy. Economics? In terms of scarcity-centricism, sure. But that's just old parts of an older system. > Transhumanists recognize, of course, that contemporary technoscience > is not an individual enterprise, typically requiring significant > capitalization, large teams of workers, and extensive networks of > knowledge exchange and distribution, but these social, > technoscientific, and economic realities are positioned as if they > are undertaken for the sole benefit of forward-thinking individuals. Uh? "positioned as if" -- positioned by who? Nobody has said anything about these being "for the sole benefit of forward-thinking individuals", and I think you're pulling a straw man. > In addition, there is little discussion of how access to advanced > technologies would be regulated or of the social and economic > inequalities entwined with questions of access. The rhetoric implies 1) Regulation. No regulation whatsoever. See F/OSS. 2) Inequalities? Basically self-replicating macromachines could drive/fly themselves to people, all 6 or 8 billion of them, so I don't see the problem. > that everyone will freely have access (as in the quotation cited Yes, that's the idea. > above), or at least that transhumanist individuals will be among the > privileged elite that can afford the advantages advanced technologies "Privileged elite"? Uh? That's only if a company or something silly like that develops the technology in the first place. So that's why we have the public project like metarepository and SKDB and OSCOMAK and so on. > will offer. How this will play out for the large majority of people > living in developing countries that cannot afford access and do not You're assuming that it will cost money. :( > have the infrastructure to support it is not an issue. Indeed, the The idea is that it will be mostly self-contained except for stuff that is environmentally accessible. Maybe solar energy or something. Maybe sand or dirt. Who knows. There might be minor restrictions like that. So, whatever. Minor issues in my opinion. Nobody's charging you to breath yet, etc. > Resisting these utopian visions are the sociological, philosophical, How are these utopian?? > reproduction. Consistent with the transhumanist emphasis on the > individual, reproduction typically figures in transhumanist rhetoric > as the reproduction of the individual through cloning, cryogenic > suspension, radical life extension, and uploading human consciousness > into a computer. In all these versions, the rhetoric assumes that the > individual will maintain his identity intact. As Hans Moravec's I am not sure how much of an issue this is. You have your own personal problem to resolve when/if you have the chance to 'reproduce but lose identity', and many billions of reproducing humans make this choice every time they couple. > Equally controversial are issues surrounding the reproduction of the > species. Transhumanist rhetoric assumes that "we" will become > citizens of a transhuman future, an assumption existing in uneasy > tension with the decisive break implied by the singularity. Who or Citizens? That assumes a nation-state. Since we are the ones building the technologies and so on, I would argue that a nation-state isn't exactly necessary any more. > what will be left behind, and what global conflicts might result from > class and economic disparities, are seldom discussed. When such There would be little class and economic disparities, given the above suggestions. > issues are entertained, as in Moravec's claim that intelligent > machines will be our evolutionary successors and that we will embrace Evolutionary successors? Yikes. :) > Of course, there would be other ways to interpret the conundrum, for > example deciding that it shows the limitations of the contract as a > basis for social interactions. This is the interpretation Leisha > eventually chooses, replacing the contract, and the individualistic > ideology that underwrites it with an "ecology of help" in which > assistance is extended even to those who cannot reciprocate in kind. Sure, philanthropy. > This modest intervention stops short of a wholesale critique of > Rand's Objectivism, however, for in this view society is still be > based on exchanges between willing partners, with the modification > that the exchange may be be unequal and indirect, circling through a > network before benefits are returned to the giver. That the system > might be based on entirely different principles than exchange remains > unthought and unarticulated. Despite this limitation, the story, > poignantly conceived and skillfully written, shows that reproduction > is deeply enmeshed with visions of a transhumanist future and the > ethical and social issues it raises. > > One need not agree with Francis Fukuyama that transhumanism is "the > world's most dangerous idea" to appreciate the critiques of > transhumanism enacted in these SF fictions.20 > =%5bG%5dSkins%2f_default%2fNo+Skin&ContainerSrc=%5bG%5dContainers%2f_d >efault%2fNo+Container#_edn20>When advanced technologies come together > with reproduction to reconfigure metalogical dynamics at every level, > from the individual to the family to the nation-state and globalized > society, it is impossible to predict accurately all the consequences > or to trammel them up, as transhumanist rhetoric implies, using > reason, technology, and science. As the SF fictions interrogated have > shown, evolution has twisted together biology and culture in strands > of enormous complexity, and cutting some of strands with advanced > technologies or rearranging them into pattern altogether different > almost certainly will entail unanticipated consequences and corollary > changes in other areas whose association with the primary changes > were not even known. At issue are the emotional dynamics of > population change as people confront the possibility that *Homo > sapiens sapiens* may not be the terminys of evolutionary processes; > of parents engendering children so different from them they can > scarcely make contact over the generation gap; of children > contemplating parents whose closely held assumptions are no longer > viable in a posthuman future. Each of these scenarios involves > complexities for which the transhumanist philosophy is simply not > able to account or to understand, much less to explain. Reason is I disagree re: unable to explain. I have explained (above). > certainly needed, but so are emotion, systemic analysis, ecological > thinking, and ethical consideration. As Pynchon's narrator in > *Gravity's Rainbow* observes, "Everything is connected." > > I do not necessarily agree with Fukuyama's argument that we should > outlaw such developments as human cloning with legislation forbidding > it (not least because he falls back on "human nature" as a > justification), but I do think we should take advantage of every > available resource that will aid us in thinking through, as far as we > are able, the momentous changes in human life and culture that > advanced technologies make possible?and these resources can and > should include SF fictions. The framework in which transhumanism > considers these questions is, I have argued, too narrow and > ideologically fraught with individualism and neoliberal philosophy to > be fully up to the task. It can best serve by catalyzing questions Too narrow? If anything, the focus on the individuals allows empowerment to solve the very same problems that you are complaining about. However, I don't know what neoliberal means, so I can't point out any ideas on that front really. > and challenging us to imagine fuller contextualizations for the > developments it envisions. Imagining the future is never a > politically innocent or ethically neutral act. To arrive at the > future we want, we must first be able to imagine it as fully as we > can, including all the contexts in which its consequences will play > out. So that process of contextualization is entirely important, yes, and it's through individuals that contexts can be distinguished and elucidated. I agree regarding the full imagination of the future. But only people who show up and contribute to this growing context can help to maximize the contextual encapsulation that you mention. It's the 'recombination' process (rather than just letting variety sit around like a rock), and part of this involves recombining with the evidence that the technologies that we can develop, as recognized throughout transhumanism -- self-replicating machines, fabricators, making stuff and thinking stuff -- which I see little indication of in the essay. So hopefully my commentary will help. Furthermore, there's a specific way to get this done and started, involving technologies that have already existed for a few decades, mostly software-based for the collaborative work that it requires, detailed, explained and deployed here: http://heybryan.org/exp.html - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Jun 12 14:52:11 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:52:11 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Wrestling with Transhumanism :: Katherine Hayles :: Global Spiral In-Reply-To: References: <22360fa10806120642v12872db6pe4559f92021c3cf4@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080612094839.05b8ce78@satx.rr.com> How revealing that Prof. Hayles reverses the sign without noticing what she's done (presumably because it accords with her prejudice): >Transhumanism, sometimes signified by Weird! I just posted a version of my ExI comment about Hayles' phrase to the website: "Transhumanism, sometimes signified by References: <22360fa10806120632u2630b82cucccb6cc60c8b2d63@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Here's an excellent opportunity for thoughtful, rational criticism and comment. [4 of 6] - Jef Of Which Human Are We Post? :: Don Ihde :: Global Spiral Of Which Human Are We Post? By Don Ihde [image: Les Ailes] Human? Posthuman? Transhuman? Did all this bother arise with Foucault? In *The Order of Things*, he claims: Man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge?taking European culture since the 16th century...man is a recent invention within it?in the midst of all the episodes of ?that? history [and] now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear?.As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing an end.1 That is, *if one accepts *a Foucault-like disjunctive-frame *episteme *account of history, *then *man?how *outr?,* since feminism it must now be human?can be invented, and if invented, disinvented or deconstructed. I open in this way because the issues of the human, the posthuman and the transhuman revolve around distinctive narratives, and these are often highly slippery. I must forewarn you that, as a philosopher, I am *highly skeptical of slippery slope arguments of any kind. *At the same time, I am not unfriendly to the notion of 'posts' since I have described, and others have described, my style of analysis as *postphenomenological.* What is the human? Biologically, modern humans, *homo sapiens sapiens, *are reckoned to be between 100,000 and 200,000 years old. How modern can you get? This is to say that biologically we differ very little from our ancient African ancestors. But is this *nature? *Not entirely. Physical anthropologists argue and recognize that many of what once would have been called cultural practices are involved with our own human evolution. Tool use technologies, created and used by our pre-sapiens relatives, preceded us by more than a million years. Tool use technologies involving complex eye-hand bodily actions are part of the way in which our brains were formed. More recently, a very provocative thesis has been put forth that the practice of *cooking* may be highly important in the evolution of our physiognomy! Cooking is a sort of 'external digestion' technology?as Ernst Kapp, the very first philosopher of technology, already claimed in 1877. Such pre-digestion provides for two conditions for biological selectivities which help define modern humans: smaller teeth, a key physiological difference between us and most earlier humans, and the loss of the skull crest to which much stronger jaw muscles were attached for chewing. And, as these anthropologists also claim, cooking hearths go back precisely to such early modern sites, but the evolutionary process begins earlier in that charcoal heaps without hearths do go back to pre-sapiens sites. I suggest that what is neat about this analysis is that it is much closer to a 'natureculture' or 'culturenature' notion, as described by Donna Haraway, rather than the too clean division between nature and culture which presumably defines the 'modern settlement' ? la Bruno Latour. It also gives a new meaning to: "We are what we eat." Or, is the modern human the one who was invented at the beginning of the early modern scientific era of the 17th century? This would be the Cartesian-Lockean human?the subject in the *camera obscura *mechanical body box, but individualized and a subject epistemologically, and also one who has inalienable rights to private pleasures, freedom and happiness in the social-political arena. Surely, this version of 'human' is enigmatically being called into question in a postmodern era?on the one side the notion of extreme autonomy, without social relations and networkings, but on the other the possible loss of or weakening of civil liberties?posing an ambiguous threat to hard won Enlightenment values. Can we have a less self-enclosed, less autonomous, even closer-to-the-animals human, without losing the important political gains made in modernity? The transcending of a now four century old interpretation of the 'human' is certainly timely and important. If we are then at a crucial juncture, a time-warp in which we, as self-interpreting animals, must re-assess ourselves, then there is a type of parallelism which stretches back to the beginnings of our 'modern' era. As it turns out, this summer one of my commitments was to do a number of entries for a forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Technology volume, one of which was an introduction to a section on science and technology. In the process, I returned to one of the pioneers of that modernity, Francis Bacon, who in his *Novum Organum *was aware of a turning point in his historical time and who developed the notion of four idols to be avoided in entering the new era. It occurred to me that this device could serve a good purpose for precisely this theme as well. So I shall talk us through four new idols in discussing the human, the posthuman and transhuman issues here. My idols are: - The idol of Paradise. This is the idol of much *technofantasy *which often underlies much of the discussion context we are engaged in. - The idol of Intelligent Design. This is the idol of a kind of arrogance connected to an overestimation of our own design abilities, also embedded in these discussions. - The idol of the Cyborg. Cyborgs, made popular since mid-century, are hybrid creatures of human, machine, and animal combinations, but what do they imply? - The idol of Prediction. Projections of futures are always involved in era shifts, but if past projections are taken into account, this turns out to be a very dicey practice. *The idol of Paradise: * Anyone familiar with much history of the literature on paradise knows that one problem with paradise is that it is likely to be *boring. *From singing angels on a cloud, to the discovery that seventy virgins may turn out to be seventy raisins due to a mistranslation, to Dante's dull paradise in the *Divine Comedy *compared to his imaginative levels of Hell,all point to the difficulty of making any utopia exciting and stimulating. I have always argued that to 'imagine up' is much harder than to 'imagine down.' Take, for example, science-fiction presentations, particularly those such as "Star Trek," "Battlestar Gallactica," and other series. When the humans and their allies, sometimes quasi-humans from other planets, come into the presence of a 'superior' set of beings, what do they find? The two most popular variants are these beings have either superior technologies or extraordinary spiritual and mental capacities (i.e., they can see futures, meld with other minds, communicate without technologies, and are usually peaceful mediator types). All of these superior technologies, by the way, can be found in ancient literatures in non-technology forms: powers of invisibility (now a type of electronic shield, then a cape of invisibility); powers to change forms (now into a transformer or a tech exo-skeleton, then into a dragon or a spider); and so on. From flying carpets to warp speed, I note there is little new in such fantasies. The difference is that since modernity the fantasy embodiments have tended to be *technological *rather than organic, animal-like, or supernatural. Contrast Bruegel's organic animal, supernatural tormentors in his paintings with da Vinci's fantasy technologies and you get something of the shift. I have earlier argued that fantasies take shape and form in relation to the relative lifeworlds of the inhabitants.2 Thus, if one lives in a world in which daily life includes frequent and existentially important interactions with animals, and for that matter, plants, as in hunter-gatherer cultures, then the wish fulfillment fantasies will take the shapes of animal fantasies, dreams, stories, or of plant cycles and growth and decay metaphors. However, if your lifeworld is one saturated with a technological texture, then you get the more 'modern' versions suggested above. The technologies will provide the magic answers. Our myths are indexed to our experiences. Clearly the implication is that our current debates concerning human/posthuman/transhuman take this current techno-mythological shape. Let me begin minimalistically with enhancement desires: Do we want more muscle power? Bigger breasts, fuller lips or tighter buttocks? Larger penises or better erections? Steroids, breast implants, Botox, liposuction or tucks, penis surgery or Viagra?this drill is apparent on television and in spam email. (Ironically, my wife gets more penis enlargement spam than I do). This has led to changes in time awaiting the doctor, in which time is shorter for Botox injections than wart removal. This in turn is related to capitalism, in the sense that injections are profitable and easy and wart removal is limited by insurance. All this is part of "Modern Times" in the post-Charlie Chaplin movie we live in. All these techniques *work*?but not without unintended consequences. Steroids increase the risk of early heart problems; silicone implants can leak and seem to be implicated with auto-immune diseases; long term Botox use has toxic effects; and in the wrong mix Viagra can cause critical low blood pressure or blindness. Paradise is not to be found here; calculated risk and trade-off compromises are to be found here. Here, then, is my thesis: The desires and fantasies are ancient. Historically, they appear in our literatures, our fairy tales, and in our art. The fantasies and desires then want some *kind of magic* to fulfill the desire-fantasy. But the form of the magic differs, according to my thesis, by the textural patterns of historic lifeworlds. From magic potions to magic injections, from an age of alchemy to one of chemistry, the fulfillment technique will differ. But why do I call it magic? Because magic, unlike actual chemistries and technologies, does not have ambiguous or unintended or contingent consequences?trade-offs are lacking, only the paradisical results are desired. How, then, does this relate to the human-posthuman-transhuman discussion? The answer is simple in one respect?to locate the desire-fantasy, look for the *hype.* Technofantasy hype is the current code for magic. Switch examples now from personal enhancement desires to technologies which will fulfill our social energy desires. Remember the time when the world community, fearful of a nuclear holocaust, hyped the 'magical' transformation of that power into peaceful uses? One was the technofantasy of limitless, almost free, nuclear supplied power. This is precisely an example of magical thinking, the hype which projects a non-contingent, non-consequential, non-trade-off solution. The 'infinitely inexpensive' projection did not take into account the need for safety redundancy, for security factors, and for the still problematic need for hundreds of thousands of years safe waste storage, all of which complicate 'paradise,' and all of which need to be calculated into the *costs* of this non-neutral technology. Please note here that I am not arguing a dystopian view. It may be possible with very careful planning, with contingency considerations and new technologies to make such an energy source less long range dangerous than it now is. Rather, I am arguing that magical thinking disregards the ambiguous, non-neutral character of actual technologies. Desire-fantasy, with respect to technologies, harbor an internal contradiction. On the one side, we want the super-powers or enhancements which technologies can confer?long range vision with telescopes, mountain moving capacity with earth movers, supersonic speed with jet power?but on the other, the technofantasy is to have this enhancement be so totally transparent that it *becomes us.* This is a Superman technofantasy; to have and to *be* the power embodied. Such then are the dynamics behind the idol of Paradise. *The idol of Intelligent Design.* Most of you are familiar with this term from the currently raging evolution/creationist debates popular in the United States. In that context, "intelligent design" is the notion that various natural phenomena, particularly forms of life, are too complex *not* to be intelligently designed. The implication, of course, is a throw-back to the old teleological argument for God, that smart design implies a smart designer. Now, were I to plunge into the evolution/creationsist argument, I would in my usually perverse provocative way, probably *invert* the proposition and argue that evolutionary results are *in fact too complicated to have been designed!* And I would look at the current state of robotics as a very good illustration of this inversion. To date there are no robots with the gracile motility of even insects-in-motion, let alone simulacra of upright posture humans playing tennis. Beetles are better at negotiating chaotic terrain than robots and in terms of flight, bumblebees and humming birds make mockery of the smart bombing "Predator" of Iraq War fame. Once again, let me warn you that my ironic gestures against this sense of intelligent design are not indicators of a lack of appreciation for technological innovation and modeling-simulation experiments. To the contrary, one of the most delightful and amusing of my observational side-lines over the years has been to witness the way a lone phenomenologist, Hubert Dreyfus, so provocatively influenced the trajectory of both AI (artificial intelligence) and robotics. Dreyfus' application of Heidegger, picked up by Terry Winograd and Samuel Flores, in programs called 'ontological design' changed office systems to much more user-friendly platforms, but in robotics, the Merleau-Pontean notion that bodily motility underlies all intelligent behavior has deflected design notions regarding robot motility. For example, the old dicta regarding a central nervous system centralized in a sort of brain-in-a-vat model for deciding and directing robot motion, has gradually begun to be replaced by 'smart insect' models of less self-conscious motility leading to better abilities to locate obstacles and such. Both directions are bodily-being-in-environment models with greater reliance upon perceptual analogs than upon calculation machine capacities. Perhaps embodied beings are less calculational machines and more sentient animals than modernity usually thinks? Permit now a shift of example. In this case human intelligent designers, recognizing the gracile motility of our fellow beings and in line with the previous desire-fantasy dreams, now wish to fulfill the ancient desire for *flight. *As I have suggested, the earliest stages of modernity began to shape such desires into technological forms, and whereas most of the imaginations pre-renaissance used large birds, dragons or other flying animals?or sometimes out-of-body dream flights?Leonardo da Vinci began to visualize different flight technologies. Some were quite naively amusing, such as his presumed anticipation of a helicopter, a 'flying screw' machine which, of course, could not possibly work! However, he was also an avid observer of birds, and birds have always been icons for the human desire to fly. Leonardo was a keen enough observer to note that bird wings contain curvatures in form which we now know allows for *lift, *and he incorporated this into his drawings of winged flight machines. None, again, could have worked. But why not? Some have argued that the conceptual design was good, but the lack of light weight materials and the lack of tensile strength of materials prevented such possibilities. Indeed, when I made remarks of this sort not long ago in a review in *Nature,* I was taken to task by an editor who pointed out that a designer inspired by da Vinci, had indeed built a hang-glider along da Vinci lines, which did glide. However, when I examined this design, I discovered that a whole series of design modifications totally unknown to da Vinci had been incorporated. In either case, once again the properties and capacities of the technologies needed to be taken into account. Humans can be stubborn, so the dream of human powered flight persisted. We look back at the funny home movies of the clumsy attempts at flight technologies at the end of the 19th century, and when flight succeeds?with modified bicycle parts and finally a non-human engine?a quite different trajectory is born. The finally successful powered flight, the Wright flight in 1903, was actually a combination of many hybrid technologies, light and flexible, strong materials, control designs for fixed wings, a small internal combustion engine and propeller (a variation on the ancient screw machine), and an abandonment of the bionic 'bird model' of da Vinci. Rather, the developmental history points to what Andrew Pickering calls the "dance of agency." That is, through much human-material interaction, from which emerged new design and trajectory factors, came today's very non-animal like flight. So, when finally one successful human-powered aircraft does appear, the "Gossamer Albatross", powered by a highly trained bicycle racer with similar technology driving a large, slow propeller, in a mylar-plastic airframe, which flew across the English Channel in 1979, the stubborn fantasy was fulfilled. Yet it was fulfilled only in ideal, limited conditions and with the appearance of a sort of clumsy, anachronistic success. Once again the idol of intelligent design gives way to a human-material or human-technology set of interactions which through experience and over time yield to emergent trajectories with often unexpected results. The fantasy model of an intelligent, autonomous designer?working out an intended result upon a purely 'plastic' material?gives way to the more realistic notion of human-material interaction, through experienced 'resistances and accommodations' in a 'dance of agency' ? la Pickering, or the invention of an entirely new set of uses for a useless 'glue' as in Latour's description of the Post-it.3 *The idol of the Cyborg:* * *Although it was probably Donna Haraway who made the figure of the cyborg into its best known form, as the non-innocent hybrid of human-animal-and-machine moving amidst the techno-science naturecultures of postmodernism, the cyborg was gestated in the *cold-think *of World War II and then the Cold War. From Clynes to Wiener to von Neumann to Herman Kahn, the technofantasies of moving beyond the humanistic were configured. First, in the Manhattan Project and thinking the unthinkable, then on to its 'peaceful' uses?such as creating huge atom-bomb produced harbors in Alaska?cold-think prided itself on machinic thinking replacing human thinking. One of the main technologies of cybernetics, after all, was to create a non-evadable aircraft artillery fire. But the slippery slope fantasies are perhaps better seen when science-fiction and its filmic expressions are introduced, as in "Terminator," "Robo-Cop," and the variations upon 'bionic' men and women. It is here that a history and phenomenology of *prostheses *can be informative: Prosthetic replacements for limbs and other body parts have an ancient history. Wooden teeth and detachable artificial limbs go back to ancient mummies. In experienced use, these prostheses fall into what I have earlier called *embodiment relations, *that is, we humans can use technologies through which we can experience our environment by 'embodying' such devices, and while in use, such devices are 'experienced through' in a partial transparency or partial withdrawal. We do not attend to our eyeglasses, or better, our contacts; Merleau-Ponty's lady with the feathered hat or the blind man with a cane, can 'feel' through these extensions for bodily motility in an environment. *But, *the withdrawal or transparency comes with both a partial incompleteness, and more, with a selectivity such that what is experienced through the prosthesis is both magnified in some aspects and reduced in others. The peg leg, or its high tech, Iraqi War hydraulic leg replacement, cannot 'feel' the hot, sun-baked surface of the sidewalk the way one's bare foot can. But through the prosthesis one might be even more sensitive to slipperiness or rough texture. Once again, it is the sensitivity to the materiality of the prosthesis which slippery slope fantasies forget. Prostheses are compromises; we may have them, but we fall short of experiencing a total transparent embodiment. At a very low and simple level, with a tooth crown, there may be a very high transparency, we are rarely aware of which tooth is crowned. But at a more complex level?say hearing aids?it becomes obvious that transparency is at best partial. In my own case, such painful occasions ranging from dinner parties to a bar, the background noise cannot be dampened even with my hi-tech digitals and remote with ambient sound suppressing programs. Nor is music, either live, or worse on the radio, what I can remember it once being. Returning to limb prostheses, today the attempt to have the artificial limb mimic likeness to the original or missing limb has sometimes given way to a different variation entirely. In a trajectory away from similarity and away from the contradictory having and not-having, a technological self is the move to have a different kind of prosthesis. Aimee Mullins, who played 'Cheetah Woman' in Matthew Barney's *Cremaster 3, *learned to use from childhood a set of spring like legs. She was born with fibular hemimelia, a birth defect of being born without fibula bones, and underwent stump amputation at age one. The spring legs, subsequently used by a number of athletes with the same defect, are *not like *human limbs, but give a selectivity which magnifies spring-powered speed capacities. Oscar Pistorius, a South African with spring powered transtibial prosthetic legs runs almost as fast as normally legged runners, but was denied Olympic entry in part because some feared such hi-tech devices might give an advantage. This is a trajectory which, while not returning our sentient bodies to us, allows us different capacities than before. Even more internalized, knee, hip, shoulder and other *implants *work and work better than damaged parts, *but implants, unlike the fantasized eternality of perfect machines, *also wear out! Metal and plastic 'ages' and must be replaced every seven or more years, and because more bone must be cut away for the replacement part, this leads to diminishing returns. Here, again, is contingency and trade-offs, and it is better not to have to undergo such procedures unless necessary and hopefully at older ages. The cyborg, when critically examined with a concern for its materiality, does not display its science-fiction technofantasy form. The cyborg, too, can be an idol. *The idol of Prediction: * In the same narratives concerning the human, the posthuman and the transhuman, both dystopian and utopian predictions produce idolatrous technofantasies. Here I could wax eloquent for pages, but I select a few predictions some of which are made by prominent scientists, others by those extolling utopic virtues in magazines, most selected for deliberate irony by current lights: - Lord Kelvin, 1895, "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." - Ken Olson, 1977, of Digital Equipment, "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Recall the above cited infinitely cheap atomic energy prediction?this era included other predictions including the atomic car which could go 500,000 miles without refueling. - Or extolling modern magical materials such as the beautification of walls with white lead paint; the amazing material, asbestos, for floor tiles, roofs, insulation and decorative interiors. - How about radioactive suppositories? So every tissue in the body could benefit from healthful radiation. These are examples from *Follies of Science *(2007).4 These can more than be matched with lists from Tenner's *Why Things Bite Back *(1996), when he cites Toffler's famous prediction of how the electronic society would be the 'paperless society,' and how home security systems, by generating false alarms, tied down the equivalent of 58 police officers full time answering 157,000 calls when only 3,000 were genuine, thus likely diverting attention to other crimes. And the list can go on.5 David Nye, in *Technology Matters *(2006) points to an in-depth survey of predicted technologies, 1890-1940; 1500 predictions, and less than one-third occurred. This, by the way, concerned what technologies would be invented, not what uses, unintended consequences, what reversals would occur. Chiding me for pointing this out in *Nature* and claiming these are pretty good odds, my response is that 50% odds are normal for a penny toss, and these are less than that! Now, you will note that I have not addressed many of the famous predictions coming from post- and transhumanists, for example, those issued by Hans Moravec, concerning downloading a human mind into a computer, and Ray Kurzweil, concerning the age of intelligent machines. Do these worshippers of the idol of prediction have credibility? Pause for a moment: Just what of a human mind would, should, could be downloaded? The internet, which plays a strong role in Kurzweil's fantasies, turned out to have some very unpredictable outcomes in relation to its original design and intent. As everyone knows, the decentralization and distributive network technologies of the early internet?largely restricted to the Cold War university cold-thinkers and the military?were designed to be non-defeasible by nuclear attacks. No central authority or power could overcome the distributed networks. Yet, once access was expanded?and is still expanding?this lack of central 'nervous system' analog control has led to all sorts of unintended consequences. From Andy Feenberg's analysis of the French minitel with its dating game results, to the current American obsession with hide and seek and avatar sting operations for catching pedophiles, non-defeasibility has turned out to have lots of unintended consequences. Thus, Kurzweil's almost accidentally correct prediction than the Soviet Empire would fail due to the corrosive power of rising internet-communication-distributed networks did point up the potentially democratic effect, or subversively democratic effect, of this technological complex. But, then, turn this back to Moravec's notion of downloading the human mind into a computer?and by extension onto the internet?and what do we have? Were we all merely cold-thinkers as per von Neumann and Herman Kahn, this might be bad enough, but how about pedophiles, and all the rest of the Freudian 'unconscious' aspects of the human mind, downloaded and distributive through the internet? What does it mean to download a mind? If it means downloading all the 'bad' parts along with the 'good' parts, are we not back at the copying machine, which is, after all, the perfect reading machine that faithfully reproduces precisely the page it is given. Were Moravec himself downloaded, would he be any better than he now is? And, if not, are we stuck with a possibly flawed Moravec now and forever? Note here that my worries are *not** *at all those of romantics, objecting because this is 'unnatural,' nor are they those of the theistically inclined, concerns with human hubris, overreaching our natural human limits. They are, rather, worries about unintended consequences, unpredictability, and the introduction of disruptions into an ever growing and more complex system. They are worries about how 'normal accidents' get built into systems as per Charles Perrow. My worries arise precisely from what I have learned about technologies in the now nearly four decades of thinking about technologies. My worries focus upon precisely the *disregard* for the materiality of technologies, the ambiguity of technologies, the multistability of technologies, and above all, the intimate role of *humans with technologies. *Thus I will conclude with another narrative, which I hope will capture the sense of what I have been talking about. *John Henry and Big Blue:* The American 'John Henry' legend expressed in songs and tales reflects an earlier era in which technologization was feared with respect to replacing humans, but in this case laboring humans. John Henry was depicted as a big Black man, known for his exceptional skills at driving spikes for setting up rails for the advancing railroad?in another version, he was depicted as a tunnel digger. In both cases, an invention?of a steam powered spike driver in the first, or a steam powered digger in the second?threatened to outdo and replace John Henry. So a contest is set up between John Henry and the steam machine, and with superhuman effort, John Henry scores a very tight victory over the steam machine. However, his efforts ended with a heart attack and he collapsed at the finish line, dead. Of course, we know the outcome. The machine actually wins, since once driving spikes or digging tunnels became automated, steam machines replaced human muscle power. And as the moral of the story goes for labor unions and a social left, the armies of Coolies who did that work on our 19th century railroads were left unemployed. But fast-forward to today: Who today bemoans the replacement of hard, 'chain-gang-like' labor with efficient machines? I switch to my observed version from two events at my retreat in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Now almost a decade ago, a devastating ice storm coated the forests of my region and mountainside, damaging many trees and downing others. I have a managed forest plan and, on the advice of my forester, accepted a selective cut. The end result was that seven double truck loads of logs were cut and sold, and the stumps cut down to the ground and brush burned or removed. How did this happen? With one tough old Vermonter, armed with a large chain and a four wheel machine, complete with road making blade, chain saw in hand by himself*?no, by himself plus his technologies?*who in a matter of weeks completed the task. Then, again this summer, this time wanting selective trees which had grown up in my lower meadow and apple orchard, now threatening my highly taxed view (there is a view tax in Vermont!) I had my meadow mowing Vermonter do the job. This time, with a large excavator with clasping arm, dozer blade, and another of the large four wheel machines?again by himself, no, by himself with the large machines?he does the job in a few days. I imagined a century ago when both these jobs would have called for a gang of Vermonters, horses and sledges, and hand powered two-man saws, undertaking what would have been a month's work. So what is my point? The technologies *did not *replace the humans; rather, different technologies *plus *the humans changed the nature of the task. Today, here in the context of the human, posthuman, transhuman narratives, the variant is, once again, the humans *versus *the machines, this time not with respect to muscle power, but with respect to *calculating power.* AI, VR, and the range of more 'mind' related technologies are again mythologizing the human versus machine myths long embedded in our culture. Now, frankly, were my computer able to simply ingest all my tax related data for my annual income tax report, and spit out a legal and yet maximal result for me, I would cheer and accept giving up the task entirely. That is, of course, not the way it happens. Instead, it happens?if I borrow from Latour's human-and-non-human collectives notion? more like this: I collect and organize my now enormous and complicated annual data, and turn it over to my tax advisor. He, now with four others in his office, format it for the programs which are responsible for analysis, and last year he said he tried some seven variants to produce the most effective result. This is a simulation and modeling process now so common for complex phenomena problems for which such calculation machines are at their best. However, again, it is clearly not human versus machine?it is humans in conjunction with machines that produce the result. And this is where I finally turn to my last legend, the 1997 presumed *defeat *of champion chess player, Kasperov, by the IBM computer with the Big Blue program. The PR?and the Minsky's and Moravecs and all the other technofantasizers?hyped this occasion as the ultimate, inevitable result of yet another mythical 'machine-beats-human' contest, a mental and century later version of "John Henry." However, that is not what happened and the history of the event not only is different from its mythical version, but precisely needs to be reframed in human *plus *machine interpretation. From the first, of course, it is human plus machine in the creation of the software. The software did not create itself, it was honed and refined by many skilled programmers, as per the previous tales in amongst the idols, and gradually perfected through resistances and accommodations and the dance of agency peculiar to computer programming. But there is more: During the match, after each game, but behind the scenes, somewhat like the gang of water dabbers and cleaners at a boxing match, Big Blue was aided by its programmers who tweaked and re-tweaked its programs before the next round. This was not machine versus Kasperov, this was the collective machine plus programmers, a collective versus Kasperov! Is it then any wonder that Kasperov is as much exasperated by the behavior of the 'machine' as he is by the lightening quick moves it can make with hyperspeed calculations? I suggest here, that only if humans are stupid enough to end up worshiping the very idols they create, could the fantasized replacement of humans by machines take place. The changing technologies with which we interact, form collectives, and experience the dances of agencies, do forecast vastly changed conditions of work and play (and even love), but it is not them versus us. In Long Island, my living room has a number of pieces of 'art' from the Sepic River region of New Guinea. I bought these pieces while in Australia, from a shop in Sydney which specialized in this sculpture 'art.' Now, in their own cultural context, such pieces were not at all what we would think of as 'art,' but were simultaneously more a sort of 'practical religious' set of objects. They served fertility, ritual, healing, and many other social functions; they were what older anthropologists might have called 'sacred' objects?or *idols. *However, if they are sacred, how could I acquire them? The answer is one which I find appropriate for my conclusion here. These sacred objects, idols, are in their original context, thought to gradually lose power, to deteriorate, even to break-down?*amazingly just like technologies?*so when they reach a certain stage of uselessness, they are discarded. And so I have collected some of these discarded idols and re-formulated their use into 'art objects' in my home. Here lies the moral of my tale concerning the human, the posthuman and the transhuman. Endnotes 1 Michel Foucault, *The Order of Things *(Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 386-7. 2 See my "Technology and Human Self-Interpretation," *Existential Technics *(SUNY Press, 1983). 3 Bruno Latour, *Science in Action *(Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 140. 4 Eric Dregni and Jonathan Dregni, *The Follies of Science *(Speck Press, 2007). 5 Edward Tenner, *Why Things Bite Back *(Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 7. * **[image: Separater]* * Published 2008.06.06 * *Comments:* Share your thoughts on this article: View / Add Comments (0) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Jun 12 15:04:55 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:04:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" References: <470a3c520806110654h43dbe00cm6c0c6ede7dc9bff0@mail.gmail.com><014c01c8cc15$5cf3f310$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <01a101c8cc9e$28201770$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> BillK homes in on a poor word choice: > Lee : > >> That is not what they *meant* at all! They (generally) do >> not claim that dead people have experiences---almost all >> of them are talking about the way that the possibility or >> certainty of death gives life more meaning *while* we >> are alive. So, yes, it's nonsense, but certainly not for the >> "reasons" you [someone else] put forth. > > I'm not so sure that it's nonsense. Yes, thanks for spotting that. Some part of me knew it was highly questionable. Perhaps it's best to reserve such absolutist terms like "nonsense" for near-gibberish. But look at all the adjectives we probably *shouldn't* use: illogical irrational unthinking absurd nonsensical Those are objective, but not correct contemptible appalling wrongheaded dispicable Those are "correct", but not objective ridiculous (it *can* be easily ridiculed) defeatist There we go! Objective and correct. But I'm at the end of my vocabulary. (It seems wrong for me to go to a thesaurus right now, for some reason.) > From the point of view that we would quite like to live for ever, then > certainly it doesn't appeal much to this forum. Well ;-) that's never been a criterion :-) > But time pressure has a way of concentrating the mind. > If you know that you only have a limited time here, then you have to > consider what you would like to do with that time. The fact of death > gives an urgency to life and causes people to philosophize about the > meaning of life. > If nobody ever died, and life just goes on with no end, then there is > less pressure to do stuff. They can always do it next year if they > want to. What Damien said. > There is also greater significance if you sacrifice your life for something. For some people, alas, I guess. > But obviously there is still meaning to be found in > life, even without the shadow of death. > It just has a different .......... 'flavor'. Yes, but it's *not* that there is any objective meaning in life. I've never bought that. It's just that if you have intelligence and energy, it's always possible to find meaning in life. And if you can't you should look at it as though there is something terribly wrong with you, which doubtless the right medication can fix, whether it's been developed it quite yet or not. Lee From mfj.eav at gmail.com Thu Jun 12 15:09:08 2008 From: mfj.eav at gmail.com (Morris Johnson) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:09:08 -0700 Subject: [ExI] When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific Message-ID: <61c8738e0806120809s3ebb4e6wa194059d6d747326@mail.gmail.com> Sorry for accidentally copy/pasting a whole exi issue back into a new issue. I was fwding a copy to archive in another email and the finger slipped/brain flopped. Morris -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kanzure at gmail.com Thu Jun 12 15:14:21 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:14:21 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Wrestling with Transhumanism :: Katherine Hayles :: Global Spiral In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20080612100143.02559268@satx.rr.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20080612100143.02559268@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <200806121014.21977.kanzure@gmail.com> On Thursday 12 June 2008, Damien Broderick wrote: > and it appeared *without* the meaningless. An example of For one stupid reason. It makes treating it and selling products regulatorily compliant when otherwise you'd have to be classedd as a drug. That's how it started, but I then said Hey maybe that's the path after all. Anti aging as the "un-disease" and disability as the "pseudotarget". It seems that the mainstream regulators care less if you treat by methods and to people they consider as a lesser economic value consumer group. Now that's a callous (but sadly true) statement I may live to regret ever uttering..... Wish me luck this weekend when I go to NDP Provincial Council this Weekend in Saskatoon. A lot of what I've alluded to in the Longevity Dividend series may not be "politically correct" and certainly is not set out in any party policy manual. I know because I was on the committee re-writing it the last 2 years. If I get my ass kicked you will all get to know as I consider how to deal with political reaction to public displays of individual thinking out loud in the public media back in my own constituency. MFJ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From amcmr2003 at yahoo.com.br Thu Jun 12 15:26:39 2008 From: amcmr2003 at yahoo.com.br (Antonio Marcos) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:26:39 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" In-Reply-To: <580930c20806120629l632ddc0dq49bc6d6973c5379c@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <946086.80286.qm@web50305.mail.re2.yahoo.com> >I might be influenced by my professional training as a lawyer, but I >strongly prefer ad personam rather than ad rem arguments, whenever >they are promptly available. And I might be influenced by my interest in logics and philosophy, but I find ad hominem (btw, is there any difference?) very dishonest and disrespectful. I prefer to subtly bring the individual to challenge his own incoherence. [], Mark. --- Em qui, 12/6/08, Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> escreveu: De: Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> Assunto: Re: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" Para: "ExI chat list" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> Data: Quinta-feira, 12 de Junho de 2008, 10:29 On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 1:45 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote: > 2008/6/11 Giu1i0 Pri5c0 <pgptag at gmail.com>: > But note that the main selling point of much of this religious > propaganda is that the faithful will gain eternal life, which would > not be much of a reward if death really was such a good thing. This sounds as well as a very good argument. I might be influenced by my professional training as a lawyer, but I strongly prefer ad personam rather than ad rem arguments, whenever they are promptly available. Nothing wrong in challenging other people's beliefs, especially when we do not share them, but when somebody's claims are inconsistent in the first place with the said beliefs, all sensible discussions are quickly and elegantly put to rest, rather than ending in opposite emotional rhetorics or, in a best and most honest case scenario, in an agreement to disagree. Accordingly, irrespective of the fact that "death gives meaning to life" is or is not a stupid statement, the most important thing to note, IMHO, is that such statement is strictly irrelevant as a ground for an anti-transhumanist stance. Stefano Vaj _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat __________________________________________________ Fale com seus amigos de gra?a com o novo Yahoo! Messenger http://br.messenger.yahoo.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Thu Jun 12 15:35:02 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:35:02 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers References: <580930c20806110229p36d0067eh3413add4200c0611@mail.gmail.com> <012e01c8cbc3$4a5a6b00$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806120226rb652c3u3c63807612fcc47@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <01a401c8cca2$64984c50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stefano wrote in the thread "Death gives meaning to life?" > [Lee wrote] >> it's been understood that one will of course have "backups" throughout >> any region of space in exact analogy to off-site storage of important >> computer data. > > Yes, it came to my mind, Schild's Ladder being even more a case in > point than Glory, where they are relatively casual about the loss of > one of more "individualities" (the real loss being considered that of > experiences and data collected since the last backup) as long as > copies are kept somewhere and can restored on the desidered support. Egan is defeatist. He ought to have grown up on Horatio Alger stories, full of can-do, overcoming insurmountable obstacles, and "never say die". All too often his characters become bored with living (after a few million years) and choose to die. It's outrageous. There are ALWAYS new things to explore. And even if they weren't, there is just something wrong with you if you happen to find stuff boring. (Unless you're bored because you know of something so much *better* to go do :-) Boredom should be and will be under our control, of course. > OTOH, it might be argued, even though this is in my view a purely > nominalistic argument, that the destruction of a given, working copy > of your identity would be "death" and that your restored backup would > be an identical individual rather than your mythical "self", so that > the loss would be prevented for your community and/or the universe, > but not really for the "self itself". Well, some of us disagree :-) Some of us think a person to be an objective fuzzy set in the space of all algorithms, but let's wait a few more weeks before going there yet again :-) > The real issue, however, is that > Egan's virtually "immortal" characters, while being , do accept > reasonable risks whenever this is worth doing - or even chose to be > terminated, sometimes, as it happens in Diaspora. Yes, and, you mentioned "Glory" here: > ...it came to my mind, Schild's Ladder being even more a case in > point than Glory, where they are relatively casual about the loss of > one of more "individualities" (the real loss being considered that of > experiences and data collected since the last backup) as long as > copies are kept somewhere and can restored on the desidered support. Yes, but to me it's even worse. At the end, there is a perfectly comfortable person who really has the ability to commit instant suicide at any point if she wishes, and so cannot be tortured. Okay, so she was logical (to me) to judge that only if she "died" could "she" resume the more attractive existence back in the Amalgam. (To my way of thinking, Egan truly does grok identity.) But why not at least *try* to have it both ways? I don't recall. Shouldn't she have been able to just cut off communication with the Amalgam (she was being held prisoner though allowed almost complete freedom on a pretty nice planet)? Then she could continue to do interesting things there, while they, figuring she was dead, restored another copy back home. But Egan seems to often have a thing against copies. (Oh, oh---Again, we should wait a while before "it" starts again.) > The real issue, however, is that Egan's virtually "immortal" > characters, while being , do accept reasonable risks whenever > this is worth doing - or even chose to be terminated, sometimes, > as it happens in Diaspora. Yes, but from our point of view here, isn't that nuts? Whatever possesses Egan? As I say, "where there is life and energy, there can be happiness" (unless something is medically wrong with you). I think that I know what happened to Arthur Clark, Greg Egan, and many more (but didn't happen to the earlier Heinlein or Laumer). Lee From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Jun 12 16:01:55 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:01:55 -0500 Subject: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" In-Reply-To: <946086.80286.qm@web50305.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <580930c20806120629l632ddc0dq49bc6d6973c5379c@mail.gmail.com> <946086.80286.qm@web50305.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080612110034.05a1dd18@satx.rr.com> At 08:26 AM 6/12/2008 -0700, Mark wrote: > >I might be influenced by my professional training as a lawyer, but I > >strongly prefer ad personam rather than ad rem arguments, whenever > >they are promptly available. > >And I might be influenced by my interest in logics and philosophy, >but I find ad hominem (btw, is there any difference?) Of course there is (is your google key broken?): "appealing to the misrepresented self-interest of those one is trying to convince." Damien Broderick From pharos at gmail.com Thu Jun 12 16:39:40 2008 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:39:40 +0100 Subject: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20080611185017.023e81f0@satx.rr.com> References: <470a3c520806110654h43dbe00cm6c0c6ede7dc9bff0@mail.gmail.com> <014c01c8cc15$5cf3f310$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <7.0.1.0.2.20080611185017.023e81f0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 12:56 AM, Damien Broderick wrote: > At 11:26 PM 6/11/2008 +0000, BillK wrote: >>If nobody ever died, and life just goes on with no end, then there is >>less pressure to do stuff. They can always do it next year if they >>want to. > > > How do you know this? From all those sad cases of bone-idle immortals > in our midst from prehistory? > > I can assure you that I feel a damned sight less pressure to do stuff > now that my body and brain are breaking down, and knowing that I'll > be dead meat in the next 5, 10 or 20 years--and if it's 20 years, > I'll probably be brain-dead meat anyway. That foul prospect corrodes > me, comrade, it does nothing to concentrate my mind wonderfully. > As Lee has jumped in to agree with you, perhaps a further comment is required. :) It seems that you are more complaining about the aging process rather than death. Sickness, at any age, has the effect of causing people to stop 'doing stuff'. Pain and disability (depending on the degree) can put the normal joys of life on the back burner while the illness is being endured and, hopefully, cured. The problem with aging, of course, is that, so far, the disease is more resistant to being cured. :( Let us look at it another way. Suppose that people lived full healthy lives, staying at age 35 forever. One group know that their body will cease functioning at age 80. The other group receive regular treatments and expect to live for around 1000 years. Up to about age 45 there probably won't be much difference between the two groups. Everything will be new and exciting for both groups as they compete for their place in society. Then the first group will begin to change. They know they have 35 years left (barring accidents). So they reach their mid-life crisis and must decide what to do for the final years. There is no such pressure on the second group. Both groups have the pressure to earn a living and survive, but there is no pressure to choose what to do for the long-lived group. Their choices are wide open with no need to rush into anything. They can continue in the rat race, or retire if they can afford it. Try something for a few years. If it doesn't work out, try something else. (Excluding personal quirks. I have known people with a furious drive to keep busy. They seem to be always rebuilding something in their house or redecorating. Other people are much more laid back. Play a bit of golf, go surfing, go out for a drink, etc. No worries, mate.). :) BillK From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Jun 12 17:15:31 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:15:31 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers In-Reply-To: <01a401c8cca2$64984c50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <580930c20806110229p36d0067eh3413add4200c0611@mail.gmail.com> <012e01c8cbc3$4a5a6b00$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806120226rb652c3u3c63807612fcc47@mail.gmail.com> <01a401c8cca2$64984c50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <580930c20806121015n4b4ea1e0u1ad0fa8454855ce1@mail.gmail.com> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 5:35 PM, Lee Corbin wrote: > Egan is defeatist. Ambiguities in Egan definitely exist, and this may or may not have to do with a rather paradoxical preach against transhumanism (!) by him that was circulated on mls a few weeks ago. >> OTOH, it might be argued, even though this is in my view a purely >> nominalistic argument, that the destruction of a given, working copy >> of your identity would be "death" and that your restored backup would >> be an identical individual rather than your mythical "self", so that >> the loss would be prevented for your community and/or the universe, >> but not really for the "self itself". > > Well, some of us disagree :-) And so do I. Just for the record... :-) >> The real issue, however, is that Egan's virtually "immortal" >> characters, while being , do accept reasonable risks whenever >> this is worth doing - or even chose to be terminated, sometimes, >> as it happens in Diaspora. > > Yes, but from our point of view here, isn't that nuts? Whatever > possesses Egan? As I say, "where there is life and energy, there > can be happiness" (unless something is medically wrong with you). What I was saying is: "Even for virtually immortal characters as in Egan's stories [and probably even more in Heinlein's stories] there are risks worth taking". On the fact that Egan's characters specifically seem more inclined to spleen and boredom than Belle Epoque upper-middle class late teenagers we may well agree. :-) > I think that I know what happened to Arthur Clark, Greg Egan, > and many more (but didn't happen to the earlier Heinlein or Laumer). Arthur C. Clarke? Which novels to you refer to? Stefano Vaj From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Jun 12 21:09:32 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:09:32 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Tommy Emmanuel In-Reply-To: <200806120351.m5C3pAPP023749@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20080611180758.0244b9e8@satx.rr.com> <200806120351.m5C3pAPP023749@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080612160835.05b0a880@satx.rr.com> At 08:24 PM 6/11/2008 -0700, Spike wrote: > > Another fine Australian! :) > >Whaaaat? Do I detect a hint of national pride? Darwin made me do it. From thespike at satx.rr.com Thu Jun 12 23:35:30 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:35:30 -0500 Subject: [ExI] "Cybernetics Is An Antihumanism": ridicule sans context Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080612182655.0235fa60@satx.rr.com> Well, let's see. I find a citation to something I wrote, so I have some notion of whether he's talking sense or not in that respect. Did Dupuy get it right? ========================= Cybernetics Is An Antihumanism: Advanced Technologies and the Rebellion Against the Human Condition By Jean-Pierre Dupuy [...] The most obvious element of the nanotechnological dream is to substitute for what Fran?ois Jacob called bricolage, or the tinkering of biological evolution, a paradigm of design. Damien Broderick, the Australian cultural theorist and popular science writer, barely manages to conceal his contempt for the world that human beings have inherited when he talks about the likelihood that "nanosystems, designed by human minds, will bypass all this Darwinian wandering, and leap straight to design success."14 One can hardly fail to note the irony that science, which in America has had to engage in an epic struggle to root out every trace of creationism (including its most recent avatar, "intelligent design") from public education, should now revert to a logic of design in the form of the nanotechnology program?-the only difference being that now it is mankind that assumes the role of the demiurge. ================= What I actually wrote: Is it likely that nanosystems, designed by human minds, will bypass all this darwinian wandering, and leap straight to design success? John K. Clark, a Miami electrical engineer and nano enthusiast, has explained why that might be feasible. He argues that with minting `if you have a good description of an object, then you could make another one, and if you don't, then Nanotechnology can examine the object and get a detailed description.' Rather than `writing' the huge number of coding steps needed to specify a complex object, we might scan a desired object at the atomic level and record the three-dimensional co-ordinates of each atom or molecule. Then a zillion teeny nano assemblers will allocate and time-share the job of making the smallest components, then joining those into next-biggest chunks, and up the ten or so steps to a gleaming, atomically-precise Consumer Thing. Will simple nano work? This is an amazing suggestion. Just record every atom's position, and then copy what you've scanned. How many atoms was that again? How much memory does this call for? How fast can it be accessed? Well, the process will be going on simultaneously in many parallel locations and levels. We must assume that data is stored in a zillion independent--but inter-communicating--nanites. We can also assume that the scanners are using excellent compression tricks, which saves a lot of storage. After all, many items of instruction take this form: `find a carbon atom; link it to the previous carbon atom on the left; find another carbon atom; repeat five trillion times'.[...] Still, it's not clear that we aren't begging major questions by bravely positing `a good description of an object' to be matter-compiled inside a mint as complex as a factory. [...] Darwin to the rescue I'm inclined to think we'll get interesting results faster through `darwinian' simulations inside computers. That approach would use what's called `artificial life' (`A-life'), based on cellular automata (CAs), and genetic algorithms (GAs). [etc] ============= So what I was *actually* saying is that design-via-stochastic-bricolage-with-oversight might be the way to go. (Whether that's a dumb idea is not the point; the good Dupuy didn't even *get* the idea.) Ho hum. Away with the least nuance! Damien Broderick From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 01:35:06 2008 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:35:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <005701c8ca38$f3194cc0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> <1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net> Message-ID: <51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com> On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 3:21 PM, hkhenson wrote: > > Sorry Natasha, this "distinction" isn't one at all. It makes no > difference if the events making up what is called the singularity > take place over hours, days or years. The end result is still the > same, humans as they are known today are no longer significant in > shaping the world. > I have to agree with Natasha and disagree with you on this... does it make no difference if it takes two years or ten years to graduate college? Get promoted at a job? Get to the end of the line at the DMV? Launch a superintelligence? Also, some people seem to be under the mistaken impression that the Singularity is necessarily a worldwide event that touches everyone. As initially defined, it meant smarter-than-human intelligence. So you could have a smarter-than-human intelligence in Antarctica that just sits around and has no impact on the world whatsoever. Until the initial, Vingean, most useful definition of the Singularity, that would constitute one, but under the new, messy, overbroad, Kurzweilian definition, it wouldn't. -- Michael Anissimov Lifeboat Foundation -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 02:02:11 2008 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:02:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <005701c8ca38$f3194cc0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> <1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net> <51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <51ce64f10806121902x1bd855c6kdae73ecd8573ca30@mail.gmail.com> By the way, Max -- cool cybergoth outfit in the talk! I await your argument for why the Singularity would be a drawn-out affair... so I might criticize it. ;-) -- Michael Anissimov Lifeboat Foundation -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kanzure at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 02:08:50 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:08:50 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Definitions of the singularity (was: re: MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday) In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net> <51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200806122108.50778.kanzure@gmail.com> On Thursday 12 June 2008, Michael Anissimov wrote: > Also, some people seem to be under the mistaken impression that the > Singularity is necessarily a worldwide event that touches everyone. > ?As initially defined, it meant smarter-than-human intelligence. ?So > you could have a smarter-than-human intelligence in Antarctica that > just sits around and has no impact on the world whatsoever. ?Until > the initial, Vingean, most useful definition of the Singularity, that > would constitute one, but under the new, messy, overbroad, > Kurzweilian definition, it wouldn't. Hrm. I'm pretty sure that you're doubly hijacking the singularity definition. It's either/or: (1) Recursive self-improving intelligence a.k.a. superintelligence. or (2) Exponential growth. From #1 comes #2 (theoretically ;-), and from #2 comes #1. - Bryan, who is just nit-picking at the moment. ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From kanzure at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 02:11:30 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:11:30 -0500 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10806121902x1bd855c6kdae73ecd8573ca30@mail.gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com> <51ce64f10806121902x1bd855c6kdae73ecd8573ca30@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200806122111.30730.kanzure@gmail.com> On Thursday 12 June 2008, Michael Anissimov wrote: > I await your argument for why the Singularity would be a drawn-out > affair... so I might criticize it. ?;-) Exponential growth looks drawn out when it starts. That's why. It's the typical story of a small pond being not-so-covered with little organisms, and then all the way up until the last few days of the month everything looks okay, but then *boom*. Those exponentials start kicking in. - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 02:08:11 2008 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:08:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <789248.33007.qm@web56507.mail.re3.yahoo.com> References: <4849F4EB.3010107@comcast.net> <789248.33007.qm@web56507.mail.re3.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <51ce64f10806121908w790bd08dk81ebec6bdd5015a3@mail.gmail.com> On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 10:15 PM, Anne Corwin wrote: > The "join our camp!" thing is the sort of mentality that generally causes > me to run away screaming from groups of people So you think that anyone that asks you to join any group is committing some grave sin? -- Michael Anissimov -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kanzure at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 02:31:51 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:31:51 -0500 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10806121908w790bd08dk81ebec6bdd5015a3@mail.gmail.com> References: <4849F4EB.3010107@comcast.net> <789248.33007.qm@web56507.mail.re3.yahoo.com> <51ce64f10806121908w790bd08dk81ebec6bdd5015a3@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200806122131.51457.kanzure@gmail.com> On Thursday 12 June 2008, Michael Anissimov wrote: > On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 10:15 PM, Anne Corwin wrote: > > The "join our camp!" thing is the sort of mentality that generally > > causes me to run away screaming from groups of people > > So you think that anyone that asks you to join any group is > committing some grave sin? Anne's brain is specially tuned to channel out bullshit. ;-) But really, what does joining a camp have to do with actually implementing and designing the technology necessary to do x, y, z, hm? Rarely does it require an actual 'joining' of a group. The joining processes are usually click click click, sign sign sign anyway, it's nothing formal and it's really just social nonsense that just confounds the actual shared values of the people that had converged upon each other anyway. :-/ - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 03:26:07 2008 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 23:26:07 -0400 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <200806122111.30730.kanzure@gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com> <51ce64f10806121902x1bd855c6kdae73ecd8573ca30@mail.gmail.com> <200806122111.30730.kanzure@gmail.com> Message-ID: <62c14240806122026x2897674as58bc928f0a3f4f3e@mail.gmail.com> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 10:11 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote: > On Thursday 12 June 2008, Michael Anissimov wrote: > > I await your argument for why the Singularity would be a drawn-out > > affair... so I might criticize it. ;-) > > Exponential growth looks drawn out when it starts. That's why. It's the > typical story of a small pond being not-so-covered with little > organisms, and then all the way up until the last few days of the month > everything looks okay, but then *boom*. Those exponentials start > kicking in. > In anticipation of the next 2 or 10 years, that 5x difference is significant. Given those 2 or 10 years as a percentage of the total duration the human record, there is no appreciable difference. I don't believe we will ever reach "The Singularity." I feel it is a useful concept to describe an asymptotic limit of accelerating change, but our ability to adapt will likely have us perpetually feel as though we are at the bottom of the exponential curve. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jrd1415 at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 04:36:19 2008 From: jrd1415 at gmail.com (Jeff Davis) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:36:19 -0700 Subject: [ExI] aich eee eah ai Message-ID: "The ability to achieve human levels of cognitive performance on a digital computer could lead to important insights and revolutionary technological applications." Where have I heard this before? http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/danl-rsp061208.php Best, Jeff Davis "Everything's hard till you know how to do it." Ray Charles From hkhenson at rogers.com Fri Jun 13 06:01:31 2008 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (hkhenson) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 23:01:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.co m> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <005701c8ca38$f3194cc0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> <1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net> <51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <1213337051_855@s8.cableone.net> At 06:35 PM 6/12/2008, Michael Anissimov wrote: >On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 3:21 PM, hkhenson ><hkhenson at rogers.com> wrote: > >Sorry Natasha, this "distinction" isn't one at all. It makes no >difference if the events making up what is called the singularity >take place over hours, days or years. The end result is still the >same, humans as they are known today are no longer significant in >shaping the world. > >I have to agree with Natasha and disagree with you on this... does >it make no difference if it takes two years or ten years to graduate >college? Get promoted at a job? Get to the end of the line at the >DMV? Launch a superintelligence? No matter how long these take, there is a watershed event at the end, a degree, a new job title, a car license. Unless you die in the line of course. Same with AI. Some of the events that the future will see as marking the singularity are happening now. As I have stated before, it's been decades since an unaided human could design a VLSI chip. And consider CGI. Are these tools, well yes. Are the tools making decisions? Again yes, millions of decisions. Are these tools on the march to sentience? If you have a good argument why they are not, please state it. Think of the economic value of being able to discuss a chip or a scene with a design computer. >Also, some people seem to be under the mistaken impression that the >Singularity is necessarily a worldwide event that touches >everyone. As initially defined, it meant smarter-than-human >intelligence. So you could have a smarter-than-human intelligence >in Antarctica that just sits around and has no impact on the world >whatsoever. Until the initial, Vingean, most useful definition of >the Singularity, that would constitute one, but under the new, >messy, overbroad, Kurzweilian definition, it wouldn't. I am surprised you would even consider the singularity in terms of geography. If a smarter-than-human AI existed anywhere within light hours of the net it would have huge effects unless it was blocked from communicating. If it was blocked, it could be co-located with MAE West and have no impact. Blocking an AI from communication would be pointless economically. Do you doubt that value of a response email from an AI that had access to all human knowledge and the ability to sort out what was needed to solve some problem? Besides it would be suicidal to block an AI if the AI had human type emotional motivations. Having been locked up in solitary confinement with very limited communications recently I can state that you *really* don't want to do that to something smarter than humans. It's bad enough to lock up an engineer. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2007/10/30/18253/301 Keith PS. Being locked up and recovering from it (not likely to ever be complete--detest California now) added a year to finding a solution to make solar power satellites a possibly viable solution to the energy crisis. Models of failing to solve energy problems show world population falling by 100 million a year. http://www.drmillslmu.com/peakoil.htm PPS. I really do appreciate that Extropians and related fellow travelers tried, donations, petitions and thousands of phone calls. Shame it didn't work. From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 09:50:24 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:50:24 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Definitions of the singularity (was: re: MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday) In-Reply-To: <200806122108.50778.kanzure@gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net> <51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com> <200806122108.50778.kanzure@gmail.com> Message-ID: <580930c20806130250q1760f15eob8fc14c78ea5a5fd@mail.gmail.com> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 4:08 AM, Bryan Bishop wrote: > On Thursday 12 June 2008, Michael Anissimov wrote: > Hrm. I'm pretty sure that you're doubly hijacking the singularity > definition. It's either/or: > > (1) Recursive self-improving intelligence a.k.a. superintelligence. > or (2) Exponential growth. Nobody has a patent on the "Singularity" terminology, and we are all free to mean by it whatever we like. For instance, the Singularity Institute AFAIK adopts three different, but very specific, meanings, all of which have strictly to do with AI. I think however that a broader sense may often be more useful, in particular that which comes from the original metaphor, and simply refers a technology-induced quantum leap, a "Zeitumbruch", involving a breakdown and loss of plausible predictivity of "ordinary" developmental rules, similar to that which took place with the neolithic revolution or the hominisation, or which ideally takes place when considering black holes or the first instants of a new universe. The real force and interest of such concept is not that of a fear-laden or rapture-seeking eschatological prospective, but on the contrary the demystification of the regular human temptation to think that life and business will forever go on as they did, only a little more and a little further than they went from our parents' to ours. Stefano Vaj From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 09:58:33 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:58:33 +0200 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10806121908w790bd08dk81ebec6bdd5015a3@mail.gmail.com> References: <4849F4EB.3010107@comcast.net> <789248.33007.qm@web56507.mail.re3.yahoo.com> <51ce64f10806121908w790bd08dk81ebec6bdd5015a3@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <580930c20806130258n333d7f5cnb7775bebd0f06744@mail.gmail.com> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 4:08 AM, Michael Anissimov wrote: > On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 10:15 PM, Anne Corwin > wrote: >> >> The "join our camp!" thing is the sort of mentality that generally causes >> me to run away screaming from groups of people > > So you think that anyone that asks you to join any group is committing some > grave sin? I respect Anne's attitude, but am personally persuaded that inevitably there *are* camps, and by not "joining" one of them you restrict yourself to that of historically passive spectators more than protecting some kind of spiritual independence. Stefano Vaj From kanzure at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 12:04:38 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:04:38 -0500 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <580930c20806130258n333d7f5cnb7775bebd0f06744@mail.gmail.com> References: <4849F4EB.3010107@comcast.net> <51ce64f10806121908w790bd08dk81ebec6bdd5015a3@mail.gmail.com> <580930c20806130258n333d7f5cnb7775bebd0f06744@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200806130704.38964.kanzure@gmail.com> On Friday 13 June 2008, Stefano Vaj wrote: > I respect Anne's attitude, but am personally persuaded that > inevitably there *are* camps, and by not "joining" one of them you > restrict yourself to that of historically passive spectators more > than protecting some kind of spiritual independence. I disagree. For example, I haven't joined the WTA. - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 12:41:48 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:41:48 +0200 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <200806130704.38964.kanzure@gmail.com> References: <4849F4EB.3010107@comcast.net> <51ce64f10806121908w790bd08dk81ebec6bdd5015a3@mail.gmail.com> <580930c20806130258n333d7f5cnb7775bebd0f06744@mail.gmail.com> <200806130704.38964.kanzure@gmail.com> Message-ID: <580930c20806130541t13e9caa8jbbdeb1d8b2038287@mail.gmail.com> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 2:04 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote: > On Friday 13 June 2008, Stefano Vaj wrote: >> I respect Anne's attitude, but am personally persuaded that >> inevitably there *are* camps, and by not "joining" one of them you >> restrict yourself to that of historically passive spectators more >> than protecting some kind of spiritual independence. > > I disagree. For example, I haven't joined the WTA. Why, I did, even though this does not mean I am going to acritically approve whatever it has done or not done or might do in the future. :-) BTW, my stance should not be interpreted in a strict organisational, but rather in "side-taking", mobilisational sense. Organisations come and go, and many people used to be devoutly communists without necessarily carrying a party membership card in their pocket. :-) Stefano Vaj From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Jun 13 13:24:37 2008 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:24:37 -0500 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <1213337051_855@s8.cableone.net> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com><005701c8ca38$f3194cc0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni><1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net><51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com> <1213337051_855@s8.cableone.net> Message-ID: <00b701c8cd58$d4597df0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> Keith wrote: > At 06:35 PM 6/12/2008, Michael Anissimov wrote: > > >On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 3:21 PM, hkhenson > ><hkhenson at rogers.com> wrote: > > > >Sorry Natasha, this "distinction" isn't one at all. It makes no > >difference if the events making up what is called the singularity > >take place over hours, days or years. The end result is still the > >same, humans as they are known today are no longer significant in > >shaping the world. > > > >I have to agree with Natasha and disagree with you on this... does > >it make no difference if it takes two years or ten years to graduate > >college? Get promoted at a job? Get to the end of the line at the > >DMV? Launch a superintelligence? > > No matter how long these take, there is a watershed event at the end, > a degree, a new job title, a car license. Unless you die in the line > of course. This thread has become apples and oranges. First, Keith misunderstood my post by assuming that I do not think that a watershed of events will occur. Since the term watershed is a popular means to describe events which occurs as an accumulative result of any number of trends which become forces, it is a given that watersheds occur. They have to occur in complex adaptive systems. Further that "humans as they are known today are no longer significant in shaping the world" is assumptive based on single-track thinking that SI will occur outside of human and that humans will not be a part of the SI advance. My particular theory is that the SI will be combined human and connective intelligence - thus the posthuman, or whatever anyone wants to call it. I use posthuman because the term is familiar in academic literature. I do not think that SIs will sprout in a major Singularity wherein humans run to the caves and villages as they are being burned down around them. This tale stems from a Buddhist story which Carl Sagan notes in his book Demon Haunted World, Science as a Candle in the Dark. It is a lovely example of the shortsighted preoccupation with oneself the near at hand, which results in a daunting demise. Be that as it may, it is not as I personally see the future. My earnest approach to the future is the combined effort of the human brain and technological innovation in enhancing human to merge with SI through stages of development and not one big event that occurs overnight. Certainly, one could look back at this from and just look at the end point and say a sudden event occurred. That is not my particular vantage because I am interested in the process. (snip) > >Also, some people seem to be under the mistaken impression that the > >Singularity is necessarily a worldwide event that touches > >everyone. As initially defined, it meant smarter-than-human > >intelligence. So you could have a smarter-than-human intelligence > >in Antarctica that just sits around and has no impact on the world > >whatsoever. Until the initial, Vingean, most useful definition of > >the Singularity, that would constitute one, but under the new, > >messy, overbroad, Kurzweilian definition, it wouldn't. You make a good point Michael. > I am surprised you would even consider the singularity in terms of > geography. If a smarter-than-human AI existed anywhere within light > hours of the net it would have huge effects unless it was blocked > from communicating. If it was blocked, it could be co-located with > MAE West and have no impact. Again, apples and oranges. Michael is looking in from the perspective of process and extending the seconds of time. Keith is looking back at an event and contracting time. Both are meaningful perspectives. Natasha Vita-More BFA, MS, MPhil/PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Faculty of Technology, School of Computers, Communication and Electronics University of Plymouth, UK Arts and Design - NBIC+ Convergence H+ Europe -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 14:05:00 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:05:00 +0200 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <00b701c8cd58$d4597df0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <005701c8ca38$f3194cc0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> <1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net> <51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com> <1213337051_855@s8.cableone.net> <00b701c8cd58$d4597df0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> Message-ID: <580930c20806130705s4c6a314fyeab87a441521f8a3@mail.gmail.com> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 3:24 PM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > They have to occur in complex adaptive > systems. Further that "humans as they are known today are no longer > significant in shaping the world" is assumptive based on single-track > thinking that SI will occur outside of human and that humans will not be a > part of the SI advance. > > My particular theory is that the SI will be combined human and connective > intelligence ? thus the posthuman, or whatever anyone wants to call it. I > use posthuman because the term is familiar in academic literature. Not only could I not agree more, but have sometimes the feelings that while postmodernist academia may have a too casual attitude towards what are the real technoscientific issues and state of the art and expected evolutions, at the same time concepts as "human", "existential", "natural", "artificial", "survival", "identity" are often taken in a too acritical, if not naive, sense by us of all. In fact, it is not necessary to swear by Foucault's or Lyotard's words to suspect that artificial intelligence has already taken over the world, namely with the appearance and deliberate, oriented self-selection of our species. So, what else is new? The real point of the concept of Singularity is IMHO that of overcoming the linear view of history, according to which things would simply gradually evolve along a simple vector, and perspectives would be irrelevant in the understanding of the world. Stefano Vaj From kanzure at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 14:09:21 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:09:21 -0500 Subject: [ExI] "death gives meaning to life" In-Reply-To: <580930c20806130541t13e9caa8jbbdeb1d8b2038287@mail.gmail.com> References: <4849F4EB.3010107@comcast.net> <200806130704.38964.kanzure@gmail.com> <580930c20806130541t13e9caa8jbbdeb1d8b2038287@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200806130909.21727.kanzure@gmail.com> On Friday 13 June 2008, Stefano Vaj wrote: > On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 2:04 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote: > > On Friday 13 June 2008, Stefano Vaj wrote: > >> I respect Anne's attitude, but am personally persuaded that > >> inevitably there *are* camps, and by not "joining" one of them you > >> restrict yourself to that of historically passive spectators more > >> than protecting some kind of spiritual independence. > > > > I disagree. For example, I haven't joined the WTA. > > Why, I did, even though this does not mean I am going to acritically > approve whatever it has done or not done or might do in the future. > > :-) > > BTW, my stance should not be interpreted in a strict organisational, > but rather in "side-taking", mobilisational sense. Organisations come > and go, and many people used to be devoutly communists without > necessarily carrying a party membership card in their pocket. :-) I'm still wondering what 'joining' has to do with anything (like expressing the actual values through i.e., effective implementations). Just let me get the RSS feed, let me on the mailing list, let me see what's up and I'll act when I see an opportunity, what does 'joining' have to do with anything but me HTTPing their RSS file? This goes the same for the majority of groups. I think around here (extropy-chat) we agree that security is thermodynamically impossible (i.e., otherwise you wouldn't be present), so the emphasis on security is rather peculiar. For example, let's make up a fictional group that needs to have Group Security. We'll call them Namuhsnarts. Let's say they are developing some tech in their basement, and so set up a website with a password. Why do they need a password? Are people going to go 'steal' the information? Are people going to laugh and make fun of them? Who cares? What difference does it make? Just do it. You don't need to make secret groups on the internet -- there is a very, very large amount of server space ready for quick migration and if worse comes to worse, I suppose you can set up a rotating webserver system like freenet or coral cache. On another note, I saw a good formulation of this sentiment yesterday from a group on wikispaces.com called 'biogang', where the originator of the group figured a few months ago that 'startups are obselete; the new way to do things is in short (but periodic) bursts of pioneering, collaborative effort'. For example, you do something, and then somebody else comes along later and picks up the pieces and does something new with the information or whatever. So, relating this back to the sentiments on 'death not giving meaning to life' and such, the idea of Having to join a group in order to say you don't want to die, and maybe this is somehow related to Eliezer's sentiments on refusing to relate specifically to any group that doesn't encompass all sentient processes, doesn't mean that your joining of the group is going to make it happen, and it doesn't mean anything but that they have a few bits and bytes stored away on their servers and databases indicating that they have another person to send email or dead trees to. - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Jun 13 14:23:24 2008 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:23:24 -0500 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <580930c20806130705s4c6a314fyeab87a441521f8a3@mail.gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com><005701c8ca38$f3194cc0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni><1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net><51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com><1213337051_855@s8.cableone.net><00b701c8cd58$d4597df0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> <580930c20806130705s4c6a314fyeab87a441521f8a3@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <00d101c8cd61$0a5a9710$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> > > On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 3:24 PM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > > They have to occur in complex adaptive > > systems. Further that "humans as they are known today are no longer > > significant in shaping the world" is assumptive based on single-track > > thinking that SI will occur outside of human and that humans will not be a > > part of the SI advance. > > > > My particular theory is that the SI will be combined human and connective > > intelligence - thus the posthuman, or whatever anyone wants to call it. I > > use posthuman because the term is familiar in academic literature. > > Not only could I not agree more, but have sometimes the feelings that > while postmodernist academia may have a too casual attitude towards > what are the real technoscientific issues and state of the art and > expected evolutions, at the same time concepts as "human", > "existential", "natural", "artificial", "survival", "identity" are > often taken in a too acritical, if not naive, sense by us of all. Let's back up. Are you familiar with my work? If so you would know that I have argued against Hayles and other academics concerning posthuman. I have introduced a different understanding of the term in academic circles, that of the transhumanist understanding of posthuman. So, please understand my perspective when I say "posthuman" as I am a transhumanist and for goodness sakes, I created "Primo Posthuman" and that ought to be evidence enough that I am not part of the academic postmodernist group nor do I subscribe with how the term posthuman has been used in academia but have introduced to academia my own philosophical understanding of posthuman which stems from the "Transhuman Statement" I wrote in 1982. Natasha From sjatkins at mac.com Fri Jun 13 14:51:54 2008 From: sjatkins at mac.com (Samantha Atkins) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:51:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Total State In-Reply-To: <108201c8c37a$feea3f10$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <108201c8c37a$feea3f10$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <67B08231-1C58-4A68-A70A-80A4E1C330BA@mac.com> On May 31, 2008, at 5:01 PM, Lee Corbin wrote: > IN the earlier flds thread, John Clark wrote > >> Amara writes >> >>> I found the State of Texas' actions to be a mind-numbing >>> expression of among the worst of the U.S.' aggressive >>> against-its-citizens, police-state, government-imposed >>> purity criteria actions >> >> A bit of verbal inflation here. If the USA is a police state then >> you'll have to invent a new word to describe North Korea, and >> all that can get tedious. And you're being unfair to police states. >> Totalitarian regimes have worked long and hard developing evil >> into a high art and there you go cheapening their image by >> comparing them to the wimpy actions of the USA. > > Masterfully said. The US is effectively a police state. It incarcerates more people on both an actual an per-capita basis than any nation on earth. That there are worse pest holes with less freedom has nothing to do with it. Police State != totalitarian. > > >>> and it added to my long list of reasons why I shouldn't be >>> living in the U.S. > > Well, every country has its problems (for any given one of us). > Even the enlightened countries of Europe, e.g., Italy, pose > their own obnoxious and disagreeable problems for some people. > Alas, on the globe the realist sees only real countries, no ideal > ones. Italy sucks. Ask Amara. :-) > > > Amara goes on to write in this thread r'chere > >>> A bit of verbal inflation here. If the USA is a police state >> >> Brief references: >> >> 1) >> The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek >> (a primer on the making of The Total State. The US is right on >> track.) > > That sounds *exactly* correct to me. It's very sad, but very true. > > I wonder what countries, however, are not headed down this path? > Is this the right/best question to ask? How about, "How can we get off this path and back to the more of the freedom we in this country wish to enjoy?" >> 2) >> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/chinas_allseeing_eye/1 >> China's All-Seeing Eye by Naomi Klein >> With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the >> prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export. > > Thanks for that too. Yup, things are bad all over, no lie. > > (Though we must be careful to be objective about this > and realize just how wonderful it is to be living in almost > *any* industrialized modern nation, compared to living > in 1950 anywhere at all.) > Ask those locked up for victimless crimes just how wonderful it is. In 1950 there was substantially less government interference in everyday life and government was substantially smaller than today. And in this so enlightened and modern country, in the heart of Silicon Valley even, what passes for consumer broadband is so s-l-o-w I can't even watch a google video. You would think it isn't the 21st century! >> 3) >> "The Best Prisons that Money Can Buy" >> http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/02/index.html > > The U.S. is such an incredible outlier on that graph! > > But there is a simple explanation. Now, since we are > talking about the prospect of becoming a police state, > let me indulge in (and exult in) a little bit of hate speech > and thought crime (while I still can get away with it). > I hope that no one on this list gets too upset. > > Consider that in California prisons, the highest representative > ethnic group is Hispanic. And blacks are nearly a third also. > In order of size, are Hispanics, whites, and blacks. > (Where is the Asian contingent, one wonders. Maybe > they're in charge, and everyone else is being discriminated > against?) > > Also, as everyone knows, half of those incarcerated in > American prisons are there for drug possession. > No one should every be imprisoned for what they choose to put it their own body in any country that remotely claims to be free. > So, if you subtract half the inmate population who're > there on drug charges, and then subtract the minorities, > the U.S. stats resemble the stats for the enlightened > northern European countries exceedingly well. Which > is true simply because that's where they came from. > You cannot do any such subtraction until you let the people out of jail and erase many of the idiotic laws that put them there. - samantha From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 17:16:37 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:16:37 +0200 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <00d101c8cd61$0a5a9710$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <005701c8ca38$f3194cc0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> <1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net> <51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com> <1213337051_855@s8.cableone.net> <00b701c8cd58$d4597df0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> <580930c20806130705s4c6a314fyeab87a441521f8a3@mail.gmail.com> <00d101c8cd61$0a5a9710$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> Message-ID: <580930c20806131016pe130799hb20b11d169bc0ae@mail.gmail.com> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 4:23 PM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > Let's back up. Are you familiar with my work? If so you would know that I > have argued against Hayles and other academics concerning posthuman. I have > introduced a different understanding of the term in academic circles, that > of the transhumanist understanding of posthuman. Absolutely. Please believe that I was not trying to lend you any kind of Sokal-hoaxesque affiliations... And you may know or remember than my own cultural roots and references are as much removed from critical studies, or at least their mainstream, as yours. But I wonder if to ignore flatly and entirely whatever has been said and thought on posthumanism in this context is entirely a good thing for transhumanists, if anything in order to be post-postmodernists rather than pre-postmodernists, as we sometimes risk to appear... :-))) Stefano Vaj From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Jun 13 19:24:48 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:24:48 -0500 Subject: [ExI] post-postmodernists ( was MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday) In-Reply-To: <580930c20806131016pe130799hb20b11d169bc0ae@mail.gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <005701c8ca38$f3194cc0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> <1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net> <51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com> <1213337051_855@s8.cableone.net> <00b701c8cd58$d4597df0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> <580930c20806130705s4c6a314fyeab87a441521f8a3@mail.gmail.com> <00d101c8cd61$0a5a9710$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> <580930c20806131016pe130799hb20b11d169bc0ae@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080613141502.02332a38@satx.rr.com> At 07:16 PM 6/13/2008 +0200, Stefano Vaj wrote: >But I wonder if to ignore flatly and entirely whatever has been said >and thought on posthumanism in this context is entirely a good thing >for transhumanists, if anything in order to be post-postmodernists >rather than pre-postmodernists, as we sometimes risk to appear... >:-))) I dealt with all that some 20 years ago (to my own satisfaction, at any rate) in my dissertation, the relevant portions appearing as THEORY AND ITS DISCONTENTS, with a discursive look at the possible rise of a new eyes-wide-open knowledge-informed humanist Enlightenment in FEROCIOUS MINDS. These profoundly unfashionable books have never been heard of by those post-Parisians who still maintain the brilliant stupidities of anti-empirical, truly untheorized "theory." (The shade of the Sokal hoax and all that it implies--mentioned in passing by Stefano--always looms over them, yet they are not one whit discomfited, the complacent ninnies.) Damien Broderick From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Jun 13 19:31:40 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:31:40 -0500 Subject: [ExI] YEAR MILLION Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080613143038.0232f7c8@satx.rr.com> John Horgan in the WSJ: >The >Shape of Things to >Come And lo! Amazon: #1,828 in Books From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Fri Jun 13 19:42:25 2008 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:42:25 -0400 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday Message-ID: <380-220086513194225240@M2W022.mail2web.com> From: Stefano Vaj On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 4:23 PM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: >>Let's back up. Are you familiar with my work? If so you would know that I >>have argued against Hayles and other academics concerning posthuman. I have >>introduced a different understanding of the term in academic circles, that >>of the transhumanist understanding of posthuman. >Absolutely. Please believe that I was not trying to lend you any kind >of Sokal-hoaxesque affiliations... :-) haha >And you may know or remember than my own cultural roots and references >are as much removed from critical studies, or at least their >mainstream, as yours. ? >But I wonder if to ignore flatly and entirely whatever has been said I don't ignore this flatly or curvaceously. In fact, I have addressed it in many academic conferences since 2001, and since 2005 at least 3+x a year in Western and Eastern Europe and South America. (And I admit that I have asked for help from Damien Broderick on several occasions just to get my brain through the adjectivity/nounicality/metaphorolities.) (For fun: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/how-to-talk-postmodern.html) >and thought on posthumanism in this context is entirely a good thing >for transhumanists, if anything in order to be post-postmodernists >rather than pre-postmodernists, as we sometimes risk to appear... >:-))) Alas, I'd rather just be new and fresh. :-) ciao, Natasha -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://link.mail2web.com/mail2web From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Fri Jun 13 19:41:18 2008 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:41:18 -0400 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday Message-ID: <380-220086513194118789@M2W005.mail2web.com> I responded, but it did not make it to the list, so I will try again - From: Stefano Vaj On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 4:23 PM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: >>Let's back up. Are you familiar with my work? If so you would know that I >>have argued against Hayles and other academics concerning posthuman. I have >>introduced a different understanding of the term in academic circles, that >>of the transhumanist understanding of posthuman. >Absolutely. Please believe that I was not trying to lend you any kind >of Sokal-hoaxesque affiliations... :-) haha >And you may know or remember than my own cultural roots and references >are as much removed from critical studies, or at least their >mainstream, as yours. ? >But I wonder if to ignore flatly and entirely whatever has been said I don't ignore this flatly or curvaceously. In fact, I have addressed it in many academic conferences since 2001, and since 2005 at least 3+x a year in Western and Eastern Europe and South America. (And I admit that I have asked for help from Damien Broderick on several occasions just to get my brain through the adjectivity/nounicality/metaphorolities.) (For fun: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/how-to-talk-postmodern.html) >and thought on posthumanism in this context is entirely a good thing >for transhumanists, if anything in order to be post-postmodernists >rather than pre-postmodernists, as we sometimes risk to appear... >:-))) Alas, I'd rather just be new and fresh. :-) ciao, Natasha -------------------------------------------------------------------- myhosting.com - Premium Microsoft? Windows? and Linux web and application hosting - http://link.myhosting.com/myhosting From mlatorra at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 20:41:31 2008 From: mlatorra at gmail.com (Michael LaTorra) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:41:31 -0600 Subject: [ExI] YEAR MILLION In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20080613143038.0232f7c8@satx.rr.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20080613143038.0232f7c8@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <9ff585550806131341k15134235xfe710d5ddffa53fe@mail.gmail.com> What a coincidence that I should see your posting now, Damien, having just returned to my hotel room in Seattle after having bought a copy of YEAR MILLION at the local Barnes & Noble. Best wishes for publishing success! Regards, Mike LaTorra On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 1:31 PM, Damien Broderick wrote: > John Horgan in the WSJ: > > >< > http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121331769665370259.html?mod=googlenews_wsj > >The > >Shape of Things to > >< > http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121331769665370259.html?mod=googlenews_wsj > >Come > > And lo! > > Amazon: > #1,828 in Books > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Jun 13 20:51:09 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:51:09 -0500 Subject: [ExI] YEAR MILLION In-Reply-To: <9ff585550806131341k15134235xfe710d5ddffa53fe@mail.gmail.co m> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20080613143038.0232f7c8@satx.rr.com> <9ff585550806131341k15134235xfe710d5ddffa53fe@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080613154721.02294760@satx.rr.com> At 02:41 PM 6/13/2008 -0600, Mike LaTorra wrote: >having bought a copy of YEAR MILLION at the local Barnes & Noble. Some chapters are deeper than others; I was trying to put in something for various levels of sophistication in the likely readership. I wonder if I might ask extrope readers to post a comment on Amazon when they've finished it? Even those who end up hating it--hard to imagine, I know. :) >Best wishes for publishing success! Thanks! Damien Broderick From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Fri Jun 13 19:40:44 2008 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:40:44 -0400 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday Message-ID: <380-220086513194044704@M2W030.mail2web.com> I responded, but it did not make it to the list, so I will try again - From: Stefano Vaj On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 4:23 PM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: >>Let's back up. Are you familiar with my work? If so you would know that I >>have argued against Hayles and other academics concerning posthuman. I have >>introduced a different understanding of the term in academic circles, that >>of the transhumanist understanding of posthuman. >Absolutely. Please believe that I was not trying to lend you any kind >of Sokal-hoaxesque affiliations... :-) haha >And you may know or remember than my own cultural roots and references >are as much removed from critical studies, or at least their >mainstream, as yours. ? >But I wonder if to ignore flatly and entirely whatever has been said I don't ignore this flatly or curvaceously. In fact, I have addressed it in many academic conferences since 2001, and since 2005 at least 3+x a year in Western and Eastern Europe and South America. (And I admit that I have asked for help from Damien Broderick on several occasions just to get my brain through the adjectivity/nounicality/metaphorolities.) (For fun: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/how-to-talk-postmodern.html) >and thought on posthumanism in this context is entirely a good thing >for transhumanists, if anything in order to be post-postmodernists >rather than pre-postmodernists, as we sometimes risk to appear... >:-))) Alas, I'd rather just be new and fresh. :-) ciao, Natasha -------------------------------------------------------------------- myhosting.com - Premium Microsoft? Windows? and Linux web and application hosting - http://link.myhosting.com/myhosting From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 21:48:32 2008 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:48:32 -0700 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <200806122111.30730.kanzure@gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com> <51ce64f10806121902x1bd855c6kdae73ecd8573ca30@mail.gmail.com> <200806122111.30730.kanzure@gmail.com> Message-ID: <51ce64f10806131448p5c1c33a0r83bdec7a55f1acc4@mail.gmail.com> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 7:11 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote: > > Exponential growth looks drawn out when it starts. That's why. It's the > typical story of a small pond being not-so-covered with little > organisms, and then all the way up until the last few days of the month > everything looks okay, but then *boom*. Those exponentials start > kicking in. Bryan, the definition of the Singularity that I use doesn't have a single thing to do with exponential growth. It has to do with the creation of superintelligence. Conceivably, this could happen during a time when progress is even slowing down. http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/people-blog/?p=209 -- Michael Anissimov -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 21:51:37 2008 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:51:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <1213337051_855@s8.cableone.net> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <005701c8ca38$f3194cc0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> <1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net> <51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com> <1213337051_855@s8.cableone.net> Message-ID: <51ce64f10806131451r7379570dlad99a9f98a747ffd@mail.gmail.com> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 11:01 PM, hkhenson wrote: > > I am surprised you would even consider the singularity in terms of > geography. If a smarter-than-human AI existed anywhere within light > hours of the net it would have huge effects unless it was blocked > from communicating. If it was blocked, it could be co-located with > MAE West and have no impact. Keith, a smarter-than-human intelligence could be an enhanced human, network of interfaced humans, or some other non-AI superintelligence. These possibilities were introduced in Vinge's original essay. Having been locked up in solitary confinement with very > limited communications recently I can state that you *really* don't > want to do that to something smarter than humans. It's bad enough to > lock up an engineer. You wouldn't want to do it because it would prevent the AI from helping us, but to attribute feelings of resentment to an AI because you lock it up is attributing human psychology to a non-human entity. -- Michael Anissimov -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 21:58:47 2008 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:58:47 -0700 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <00b701c8cd58$d4597df0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <005701c8ca38$f3194cc0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> <1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net> <51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com> <1213337051_855@s8.cableone.net> <00b701c8cd58$d4597df0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> Message-ID: <51ce64f10806131458i309fe32bh548c4ae3cb4b3527@mail.gmail.com> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 6:24 AM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > > Further that "humans as they are known today are no longer significant in > shaping the world" is assumptive based on single-track thinking that SI will > occur outside of human and that humans will not be a part of the SI > advance. > Natasha, the possibility of a hard-takeoff AI operating largely independent of humans is a real possibility, not single-track thinking. If someone created a smarter-than-human AI, it might be easier for the AI to initially improve upon itself recursively, rather than enhance the intelligence of other humans. This would be for various reasons: it would have complete access to its own source code, its cognitive elements would be operating much faster, it could extend itself onto adjacent hardware, etc. Even a friendly superintelligent AI might decide that it's easiest to help humans by improving itself quickly, then actually offering help only after it has reached an extremely high level of capability. Are you familiar with the general arguments for hard takeoff AI? Quite a few are found here: http://www.singinst.org/upload/LOGI//seedAI.html. If you assign a hard takeoff a very low probability, then I would at least figure that you've read the arguments in favor of the possibility and have refutations of them. > My earnest approach to the future is the combined effort of the human brain > and technological innovation in enhancing human to merge with SI through > stages of development and not one big event that occurs overnight. > This may be your preference, but it may turn out to simply be technologically easier to create a self-improving AI first. Sort of like how I might like to say that I'd prefer for fossil fuels to be replaced by solar power, but replacing them with nuclear seems far simpler technologically. -- Michael Anissimov -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kanzure at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 22:17:48 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:17:48 -0500 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10806131448p5c1c33a0r83bdec7a55f1acc4@mail.gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <200806122111.30730.kanzure@gmail.com> <51ce64f10806131448p5c1c33a0r83bdec7a55f1acc4@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200806131717.48779.kanzure@gmail.com> On Friday 13 June 2008, Michael Anissimov wrote: > Bryan, the definition of the Singularity that I use doesn't have a > single thing to do with exponential growth. ?It has to do with the > creation of superintelligence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity > The technological singularity is a hypothesised point in the future > variously characterized by the technological creation of > self-improving intelligence, unprecedentedly rapid technological > progress, or some combination of the two. You still haven't proven to me ever since a few months ago when we had our chat how superintelligence alone could bruteforce itself out of a machine chasis without the interfaces and grounding that would frankly have to exponentially grow in order to keep up with those numbers. * Actually, it's okay if it doesn't get "out", I just mean that the Apple II becomes an emachines 900 (only if you consider that an improvement; I suspect our local Mac enthusiasts would consider it the complete opposite). But go ahead and have your own definition. It might be easier if you specialized your terminology and just said superintelligence initiated growth (SIG) to focus on that one aspect of a/the singularity. I can't stop you. :) - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Fri Jun 13 22:20:47 2008 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:20:47 -0400 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday Message-ID: <380-220086513222047610@M2W027.mail2web.com> From: Michael Anissimov On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 6:24 AM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: >>Further that "humans as they are known today are no longer significant in >>shaping the world" is assumptive based on single-track thinking that SI will >>occur outside of human and that humans will not be a part of the SI >>advance. >Natasha, the possibility of a hard-takeoff AI operating largely independent >of humans is a real possibility, not single-track thinking. Yes, it is a possibility of course. I was not saying that it is not a real possibility. I was saying in response to Keith that suggesting it to be a given/only situation is a single-track. >If someone created a smarter-than-human AI, it might be easier for the AI to >initially improve upon itself recursively, rather than enhance the >intelligence of other humans. This would be for various reasons: it would >have complete access to its own source code, its cognitive elements would be >operating much faster, it could extend itself onto adjacent hardware, etc. Sure. But that would not prevent a human from teaming up with the AI and merging. >Even a friendly superintelligent AI might decide that it's easiest to help >humans by improving itself quickly, then actually offering help only after >it has reached an extremely high level of capability. Sure. But that would not prevent a human from treaming up with the AI and merging. >Are you familiar with the general arguments for hard takeoff AI? Yes of course. >>My earnest approach to the future is the combined effort of the human brain >>and technological innovation in enhancing human to merge with SI through >>stages of development and not one big event that occurs overnight. >This may be your preference, but it may turn out to simply be >technologically easier to create a self-improving AI first. Sort of like >how I might like to say that I'd prefer for fossil fuels to be replaced by >solar power, but replacing them with nuclear seems far simpler >technologically. Yes, it might. And it might be a good idea. But, again, that does no prevent the other option. Actually it might help it. Bty, I wrote a paper two years ago on this. It is published in some journal in the UK. Peter Voss worked with me on it. It is about the human and the AI. You should read it. Oh, this is timely ... I am presenting another paper in Vienna in 3 weeks on the Singularity at Universitat Fur Angewandte Kunst Wien. http://www.dieangewandte.at/ The title is "The Mediated Technological Singularity: Human Use as a Passport to Technological Innovation". I'll pose some quesitons to the list about content next week. cheers, Natasha -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web LIVE ? Free email based on Microsoft? Exchange technology - http://link.mail2web.com/LIVE From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 22:22:25 2008 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:22:25 -0700 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <200806131717.48779.kanzure@gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <200806122111.30730.kanzure@gmail.com> <51ce64f10806131448p5c1c33a0r83bdec7a55f1acc4@mail.gmail.com> <200806131717.48779.kanzure@gmail.com> Message-ID: <51ce64f10806131522o2e1d672al6a075e4f90f45640@mail.gmail.com> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 3:17 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote: > > > The technological singularity is a hypothesised point in the future > > variously characterized by the technological creation of > > self-improving intelligence, unprecedentedly rapid technological > > progress, or some combination of the two. Yes, this is a muddying-the-waters of the original definition, caused when Kurzweil took up the term "Singularity" and started defining it in all sorts of new ways that have nothing to do with the original definition. I guess I should just start giving up and calling the original definition "Vinge's Event Horizon". You still haven't proven to me ever since a few months ago when we had > our chat how superintelligence alone could bruteforce itself out of a > machine chasis without the interfaces and grounding that would frankly > have to exponentially grow in order to keep up with those numbers. No, clearly it would need to acquire interfaces to the external world. These arguments can't be "proven" one way or the other -- I can only present the arguments and wait for your response. > But go ahead and have your own definition. It might be easier if you > specialized your terminology and just said superintelligence initiated > growth (SIG) to focus on that one aspect of a/the singularity. I can't > stop you. :) You're right, I have to be more specific. I think it would benefit H+ as a whole if more transhumanists were aware of Vinge's Event Horizon, and how it differs fundamentally from Kurzweil's Singularity. -- Michael Anissimov -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kanzure at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 22:26:55 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:26:55 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Bootstrapping a singularity (not-essay) (was Re: MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday) In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10806131458i309fe32bh548c4ae3cb4b3527@mail.gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <00b701c8cd58$d4597df0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> <51ce64f10806131458i309fe32bh548c4ae3cb4b3527@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200806131726.55758.kanzure@gmail.com> On Friday 13 June 2008, Michael Anissimov wrote: > Natasha, the possibility of a hard-takeoff AI operating largely > independent of humans is a real possibility, not single-track > thinking. Grounding problem. Instrumentation is still largely grounded in human society. > If someone created a smarter-than-human AI, it might be easier for > the AI to initially improve upon itself recursively, rather than > enhance the intelligence of other humans. ?This would be for various > reasons: it would have complete access to its own source code, its > cognitive elements would be operating much faster, it could extend > itself onto adjacent hardware, etc. What adjacent hardware? That's only if the seed hardware, in the first place, was wired up to it. So far you just said superintelligence, not anything about implementation like hardware and so on. Let's say we have a self-recursive seedai implemented; then, if it's going to be accelerating, it has to have accelerating computational capacity, which necessistates physical implementation. > Are you familiar with the general arguments for hard takeoff AI? > ?Quite a few are found here: > http://www.singinst.org/upload/LOGI//seedAI.html. ?If you assign a > hard takeoff a very low probability, then I would at least figure > that you've read the arguments in favor of the possibility and have > refutations of them. Read it again, Michael: > The ability to add and absorb new hardware. The human brain is > instantiated with a species-typical upper limit on computing power > and loses neurons as it ages. In the computer industry, computing > power continually becomes exponentially cheaper, and serial speeds > exponentially faster, with sufficient regularity that "Moore's Law" > [Moore97] is said to govern its progress. Nor is an AI project > limited to waiting for Moore's Law; an AI project that displays an > important result may conceivably receive new funding which enables > the project to buy a much larger clustered system (or rent a larger > computing grid), perhaps allowing the AI to absorb hundreds of times > as much computing power. By comparison, the 5-million-year > transition from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens sapiens involved a > tripling of cranial capacity relative to body size, and a further > doubling of prefrontal volume relative to the expected prefrontal > volume for a primate with a brain our size, for a total sixfold > increase in prefrontal capacity relative to primates [Deacon90]. At > 18 months per doubling, it requires 3.9 years for Moore's Law to > cover this much ground. Even granted that intelligence is more > software than hardware, this is still impressive. *cough* It's funding-limited, instead of self-manufacturing and truly self-replicating and so on. Although the virtual bitspace of the internet may seem to be expanding effortlessly, it's based on the physical implementation of the transistors, which build up the flip flops in our RAM modules, which makes up the memory that we have so much of (well, it never really seems enough, but 2003 estimates had it at 161 exabytes or so, and by now that's a very, very low estimate). So, let's think about the hardware manufacturing behind the ai machinery. Let's consider the si fab. That's a linear production facility. You could build a fab that builds si fabs, I guess, but that's still linear. You need an si fab that builds the silicon componentry *plus* si fabs, i.e. a self-replicating machine, otherwise you're still going to be limited by the output of the si fab, and in the case of scarcity-centricism and money (getting donations to add hardware), that's limited by the amount of money and all sorts of weird economics going on, which I'm just about ready to refuse to touch at all (simply because it's ridiculous). The goal is acceleration, not limitation due to old, silly systems. ;-) That's why the manufacturing processes are needed, that's why the grounding problem is important. Not just symbolic grounding problem nonsense, I'm talking about cybernetic interfaces I guess. Feedback, etc. Sorry for the hijack. - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From kanzure at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 22:31:15 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:31:15 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Fwd: On the problems with considering 'ethics' with respect to disease control and prevention. Message-ID: <200806131731.15670.kanzure@gmail.com> ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: [Hplusroadmap] Here's my solution to those 'ethics' calls re: DIY biotech. Date: Friday 13 June 2008 From: Bryan Bishop To: Transhuman Technical Roadmap The blog post that I was replying to: http://community.safenano.org/blogs/andrew_maynard/archive/2008/06/13/synthetic-biology-ethics-and-the-hacker-culture.aspx Here's my response: http://heybryan.org/mediawiki/index.php/2008-06-13#Comment_on_Andrew_Maynard.27s_blog_post Copied below. ============================================ Hey, So you ask how to go about the development of that framework so that some angsty teens don't go about screwing things up royally. The problem with this sort of thinking is that, what if you are wrong? What if your ethical framework doesn't work out in the end and bioterrorists do emerge and so on? That's not good at all. That's not something that regulatory policy is going to stop, that's something that's as bad as a disease. Think about the problems that we have with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention: they can hardly control the common cold, much less the flu, much less anything with more letters to its name. That's not the way to do it. That's the way to fail. Instead of hoping that we can encompass everyone into a regulatory framework (which could still be developed anyway, sure), we should be focusing on ways to make sure that we aren't, uh, killed. This is going to require change. Does anybody remember what was happening back when we were building nuclear bunkers? I don't. But from what I can tell, and from what I've read and seen, people were beginning to build solutions against nuclear fallout (radiation). Yes, politics still went on and people were trying to make sure the superpowers at large wouldn't blow everything up -- thus developed the Cold War -- but really, people got serious and realized that politics might fail and so they took action. They built bunkers. Same thing here. The solution isn't exactly bunkers. The solution is (partial) isolation, the solution is medical science training, the solution is epidemiology and the tracking of diseases, of training the population at large to be able to take responsibility for themselves. The solution is to implement in vitro meat tanks as much as possible, to implement space pods and moderately isolated environments, amazing air purification systems, etc. etc. High-class facilities already implement these sorts of systems, like in si fabs, BSL5 labs, probably a good number of government facilities. But there's no reason that we can't start taking this sort of responsibility into our own hands. A good first step is the acquisition of the ability to maintain 'environmental integrity', such as monitoring for biological agents, infections, etc., how to have enough energy reserves when the current (thawed) meat supply becomes infected and needs to be trashed (autoclaved), etc. etc. One of the minor projects that we can start with is face mask technology, seeing where that leads us. There's probably a good amount of information on this out on the internet due to the proliferation of chemical warfare (so, there's a useful byproduct of all that fighting, right?). Anyway, an ultimate solution that I hope others will join up with is the idea of spacepods. The current International Space Station is an illustration of this. Bigelow's expandable space pod is also an example of this. The idea is to have a pod that is environmentally isolated and can be completely managed, so that *you* control what you breath, what you eat, who you allow on board, so that *you* can implement policies and make sure you're not going to kill yourself. http://openvirgle.net/ Another interesting option is to wonder, hey, what if we let our bodies die? Why not focus on making backup systems? There's no reason why our walking bodies have to be the only ones. Yes, we can clone DNA. No, we cannot clone brains. But that's no reason why we shouldn't be trying to implement brain backup technology. That's another project that I like to focus on. I'm not talking about Mind Upload ( http://minduploading.org/research.html is an example of the seeds of this ). I'm just talking about the concept of storing information that could be used to reconstruct a similar brain. There's going to be loss, but frankly I find it acceptable in face of the alternative (i.e., total death). I hope this helps. I'm the guy you quoted. - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ ------------------------------------------------------- ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: Re: [Hplusroadmap] Here's my solution to those 'ethics' calls re: DIY biotech. Date: Friday 13 June 2008 From: Bryan Bishop To: Transhuman Technical Roadmap On Friday 13 June 2008, Bryan Bishop wrote: > do emerge and so on? That's not good at all. That's not something > that regulatory policy is going to stop, that's something that's as > bad as a disease. Think about the problems that we have with the > Center for Disease Control and Prevention: they can hardly control > the common cold, much less the flu, much less anything with more > letters to its name. Oops. Actually, in all honesty, those guys are doing an awesome job, but the common day-to-day infectious diseases, germs, bacteria, viruses, etc., are in fact an example of something that they cannot control. - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ ------------------------------------------------------- ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Fri Jun 13 17:59:31 2008 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:59:31 -0400 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday Message-ID: <380-220086513175931610@M2W028.mail2web.com> From: Stefano Vaj On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 4:23 PM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: >>Let's back up. Are you familiar with my work? If so you would know that I >>have argued against Hayles and other academics concerning posthuman. I have >>introduced a different understanding of the term in academic circles, that >>of the transhumanist understanding of posthuman. >Absolutely. Please believe that I was not trying to lend you any kind >of Sokal-hoaxesque affiliations... :-) haha. >But I wonder if to ignore flatly and entirely whatever has been said >and thought on posthumanism in this context is entirely a good thing >for transhumanists, if anything in order to be post-postmodernists >rather than pre-postmodernists, as we sometimes risk to appear... >:-))) Why do you think it is being ignored? It cannot be ignored! (I said that I have specifically addressed the posthumanism thingy in academic(actually, several times a year since 2001, and 3x+ per year since 2006 foward at academic conferences.)) Anyway, you make good points. esque, Natasha -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web.com - Microsoft? Exchange solutions from a leading provider - http://link.mail2web.com/Business/Exchange From kanzure at gmail.com Fri Jun 13 22:38:53 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:38:53 -0500 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10806131522o2e1d672al6a075e4f90f45640@mail.gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <200806131717.48779.kanzure@gmail.com> <51ce64f10806131522o2e1d672al6a075e4f90f45640@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200806131738.54041.kanzure@gmail.com> On Friday 13 June 2008, Michael Anissimov wrote: > On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 3:17 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote: > > > > > > > The technological singularity is a hypothesised point in the > > > future variously characterized by the technological creation of > > > self-improving intelligence, unprecedentedly rapid technological > > > progress, or some combination of the two. > > Yes, this is a muddying-the-waters of the original definition, caused > when Kurzweil took up the term "Singularity" and started defining it > in all sorts of new ways that have nothing to do with the original > definition. I guess I should just start giving up and calling the > original definition "Vinge's Event Horizon". I would agree that 'rapid techological progress' is muddy and doesn't preserve as much, but when replaced with the idea of exponential or accelerating growth, you get the same thing as with seedai scenarios, since self-replication leads to recursive self-improving intelligence. > > You still haven't proven to me ever since a few months ago when we > > had our chat how superintelligence alone could bruteforce itself out > > of a machine chasis without the interfaces and grounding that would > > frankly have to exponentially grow in order to keep up with those > > numbers. > > No, clearly it would need to acquire interfaces to the external > world. These arguments can't be "proven" one way or the other -- I > can only present the arguments and wait for your response. Yes, but it's a bigger problem than just that. It's not only that it needs interfaces to the external world, but that it needs to be an embodied self-improving recursive process itself, otherwise it's just an embodiment of the same constraints and limitations that we find ourselves in, or the current restraints and limitations of current technology. Sure, you could simulate a brain with a big enough supercomputer using modern techniques, but that's only linearly recursive and it will hit the fabricational barriers, just like we are hitting them now (i.e., all of that information is locked up in proprietary databases (or probably, people)), etc. > I think it would benefit H+ as a whole if more transhumanists were > aware of Vinge's Event Horizon, and how it differs fundamentally from > Kurzweil's Singularity. I don't know if it matters that much. We're all for the same fundamental values anyway, but it just seems like we're not synchronized on the same levels of thought here. - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From max at maxmore.com Fri Jun 13 22:53:03 2008 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:53:03 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Please change subject title [was Re: MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday] In-Reply-To: <200806131738.54041.kanzure@gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <200806131717.48779.kanzure@gmail.com> <51ce64f10806131522o2e1d672al6a075e4f90f45640@mail.gmail.com> <200806131738.54041.kanzure@gmail.com> Message-ID: <20080613225306.NFSD9858.hrndva-omta02.mail.rr.com@D840DTB1.maxmore.com> This thread ceased a while ago to be about my talk in Second Life (and is not *yet* about the next one). Please retitle it more appropriately. Thanks, Max Max More, Ph.D. Strategic Philosopher www.maxmore.com max at maxmore.com From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Jun 14 00:25:53 2008 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (hkhenson) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:25:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10806131451r7379570dlad99a9f98a747ffd@mail.gmail.co m> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <005701c8ca38$f3194cc0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> <1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net> <51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com> <1213337051_855@s8.cableone.net> <51ce64f10806131451r7379570dlad99a9f98a747ffd@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <1213403318_638@s2.cableone.net> At 02:51 PM 6/13/2008, Michael wrote: >On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 11:01 PM, hkhenson ><hkhenson at rogers.com> wrote: > >I am surprised you would even consider the singularity in terms of >geography. If a smarter-than-human AI existed anywhere within light >hours of the net it would have huge effects unless it was blocked >from communicating. If it was blocked, it could be co-located with >MAE West and have no impact. > >Keith, a smarter-than-human intelligence could be an enhanced human, >network of interfaced humans, or some other non-AI >superintelligence. These possibilities were introduced in Vinge's >original essay. Read it. Many years ago and several times since. If you have since read "A Deepness in the Sky" go back and read it again. >Having been locked up in solitary confinement with very >limited communications recently I can state that you *really* don't >want to do that to something smarter than humans. It's bad enough to >lock up an engineer. > >You wouldn't want to do it because it would prevent the AI from >helping us, but to attribute feelings of resentment to an AI because >you lock it up is attributing human psychology to a non-human entity. Two of the three you mentioned above *are* humans and I don't know about the third. I suspect (read Marvin Minsky's latest book) that the quality we refer to as intelligence will not emerge until the entity has emotions and personality. It would greatly surprise me if a useful personality could be constructed that didn't incorporate resentment as an emotion in appropriate circumstances. If you want an AI to help humans, then you need to give it emotions that a helpful human has. Incidentally, the combination of an engineer and something as simple as a spread sheet has super human intelligence. Keith From nvitamore at austin.rr.com Fri Jun 13 22:21:24 2008 From: nvitamore at austin.rr.com (nvitamore at austin.rr.com) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:21:24 -0400 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday Message-ID: <380-220086513222124847@M2W020.mail2web.com> From: Michael Anissimov On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 6:24 AM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: >>Further that "humans as they are known today are no longer significant in >>shaping the world" is assumptive based on single-track thinking that SI will >>occur outside of human and that humans will not be a part of the SI >>advance. >Natasha, the possibility of a hard-takeoff AI operating largely independent >of humans is a real possibility, not single-track thinking. Yes, it is a possibility of course. I was not saying that it is not a real possibility. I was saying in response to Keith that suggesting it to be a given/only situation is a single-track. >If someone created a smarter-than-human AI, it might be easier for the AI to >initially improve upon itself recursively, rather than enhance the >intelligence of other humans. This would be for various reasons: it would >have complete access to its own source code, its cognitive elements would be >operating much faster, it could extend itself onto adjacent hardware, etc. Sure. But that would not prevent a human from teaming up with the AI and merging. >Even a friendly superintelligent AI might decide that it's easiest to help >humans by improving itself quickly, then actually offering help only after >it has reached an extremely high level of capability. Sure. But that would not prevent a human from treaming up with the AI and merging. >Are you familiar with the general arguments for hard takeoff AI? Yes of course. >>My earnest approach to the future is the combined effort of the human brain >>and technological innovation in enhancing human to merge with SI through >>stages of development and not one big event that occurs overnight. >This may be your preference, but it may turn out to simply be >technologically easier to create a self-improving AI first. Sort of like >how I might like to say that I'd prefer for fossil fuels to be replaced by >solar power, but replacing them with nuclear seems far simpler >technologically. Yes, it might. And it might be a good idea. But, again, that does no prevent the other option. Actually it might help it. Bty, I wrote a paper two years ago on this. It is published in some journal in the UK. Peter Voss worked with me on it. It is about the human and the AI. You should read it. Oh, this is timely ... I am presenting another paper in Vienna in 3 weeks on the Singularity at Universitat Fur Angewandte Kunst Wien. http://www.dieangewandte.at/ The title is "The Mediated Technological Singularity: Human Use as a Passport to Technological Innovation". I'll pose some quesitons to the list about content next week. cheers, Natasha -------------------------------------------------------------------- myhosting.com - Premium Microsoft? Windows? and Linux web and application hosting - http://link.myhosting.com/myhosting From stathisp at gmail.com Sat Jun 14 01:40:21 2008 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:40:21 +1000 Subject: [ExI] The Total State In-Reply-To: <67B08231-1C58-4A68-A70A-80A4E1C330BA@mac.com> References: <108201c8c37a$feea3f10$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <67B08231-1C58-4A68-A70A-80A4E1C330BA@mac.com> Message-ID: 2008/6/14 Samantha Atkins : > Ask those locked up for victimless crimes just how wonderful it is. > In 1950 there was substantially less government interference in > everyday life and government was substantially smaller than today. Other than cigarette smoking, can you give an example of how people were less persecuted for victimless crimes in 1950 compared to today? > And in this so enlightened and modern country, in the heart of Silicon > Valley even, what passes for consumer broadband is so s-l-o-w I can't > even watch a google video. You would think it isn't the 21st century! And is that a failure on the part of Government or the free market? -- Stathis Papaioannou From pgptag at gmail.com Sat Jun 14 06:52:02 2008 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 08:52:02 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silvermoon Meeting: Launch of the Order of Cosmic Engineers in World of Warcraft Message-ID: <470a3c520806132352t5327323bxf97bc66534cd2a9e@mail.gmail.com> The foundation of the Order of Cosmic Engineers was announced at The Future of Religions/Religions of the Future conference in Second Life on June 5, 2008. There will be a launch event in World of Warcraft TODAY June 14, 2008, at noon EST, hosted by Bainbridge's WoW Science Guild. The Prospectus of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, collaboratively authored by the Order's founding members, and other parts of the website, will be online tomorrow June 15, 2008. See Bainbridge's convergentsystems wiki for information on the Order's launch at the Silvermoon Meeting, Saturday, June 14 noon server time. Please see the Earthen Ring US page for information on how to set up your WoW character to attend the event. In summary: you must choose the the North American server, Earthen Ring US, and your character must belong to the Horde. Europeans see here. See http://cosmeng.org/ We hope to see transhumanist WoWers today! G. From pgptag at gmail.com Sat Jun 14 11:53:12 2008 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 13:53:12 +0200 Subject: [ExI] 4th ANNUAL VIRTUAL WORKSHOP ON GEOETHICAL NANOTECHNOLOGY Message-ID: <470a3c520806140453j4f2d089ch2055c63a50fa2a12@mail.gmail.com> 4th ANNUAL VIRTUAL WORKSHOP ON GEOETHICAL NANOTECHNOLOGY TERASEM MOVEMENT, INC. TERASEM ISLAND, SECOND LIFE www.GeoNano2008.com JULY 20, 2008 1:00 PM ? 4:00 PM EST WHO: All professionals with an interest in nanotechnology, cryonic revival, and cyber-consciousness. WHAT: The Virtual Workshop offers a forum to exchange of scholarly views regarding what geoethical management, if any, is appropriate for the nanotechnology necessary for cryonic revival and/or embodiment of downloaded cyber-consciousness. WHEN: July 20, 2008 1:00 PM ? 4:00 PM EST ? the 39th Anniversary of the first lunar launch. WHERE: Terasem Island in SecondLife at http://www.secondlife.com (Teleport to one of the following coordinates: 121.155.30) WHY: To develop an optimal body of policy in advance of the immediate need for such when scientists and entrepreneurs present society with immortalizing nanotechnology. HOW: Submit a title and 100-word abstract for a 20 minute PowerPoint presentation to lori at terasemcentral.org no later than June 20, 2008. Accepted presenters will be notified by July 1, 2008. Each presenter will be provided with 20 minutes to make their PowerPoint presentation to the workshop attendees (all of whom are presenters), as well as to the general public via webcasting. In between each presentation a further 20 minute period is provided for discussion. All presentations and discussions will be transcribed and submitted to each presenter for his/her approval. Once a presenter approves his/her transcript, it will be posted on the workshop website and may also be published in the Online Journal of Geoethical Nanotechnology. For further information contact: Lori Rhodes at: 321-676-3690 ext. 100 Or lori at terasemcentral.org From aleksei at iki.fi Sat Jun 14 13:22:13 2008 From: aleksei at iki.fi (Aleksei Riikonen) Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 16:22:13 +0300 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanist MMORPGers Message-ID: <1db0b2da0806140622k4f844c7egd59430c4b1b09586@mail.gmail.com> On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 9:52 AM, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote: > The foundation of the Order of Cosmic Engineers was announced at The > Future of Religions/Religions of the Future conference in Second Life > on June 5, 2008. There will be a launch event in World of Warcraft > TODAY June 14, 2008, at noon EST, hosted by Bainbridge's WoW Science > Guild. The Prospectus of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, > collaboratively authored by the Order's founding members, and other > parts of the website, will be online tomorrow June 15, 2008. > > See Bainbridge's convergentsystems wiki for information on the Order's > launch at the Silvermoon Meeting, Saturday, June 14 noon server time. > Please see the Earthen Ring US page for information on how to set up > your WoW character to attend the event. In summary: you must choose > the the North American server, Earthen Ring US, and your character > must belong to the Horde. Europeans see here. > > See http://cosmeng.org/ > > We hope to see transhumanist WoWers today! I'd like to recommend that if people are gonna play MMORPGs, they try out EVE Online instead of playing something like WoW. EVE Online certainly has by far the most demanding learning curve among MMORPGs (I have never seen this disputed), and in a wholly positive way; it's not fucked up design or anything like that that makes it more challenging, just the depth and complexity of it all. No other current MMORPG has an equally complex virtual economy (could other MMORPG worlds non-hilariously employ a PhD economist putting out quarterly reports?), or an equally rich political landscape of competing player alliances, as the possibilities for PVP and the infrastructural elements for empire building in EVE are from a different plane of complexity than in typical MMORPGs. If you do not currently play MMORPGs, I do *not* recommend EVE, as computer games tend to be silly time sinks. But every intelligent person who does waste time with MMORPGs, should certainly look into it. Also, to you people building this Order you speak of; you might find ideological allies in this EVE Online "guild" (actually they are called corporations in EVE; it's a scifi world instead of fantasy): http://www.eve-viv.net/ -- Aleksei Riikonen - http://www.iki.fi/aleksei From pharos at gmail.com Sat Jun 14 14:04:07 2008 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:04:07 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanist MMORPGers In-Reply-To: <1db0b2da0806140622k4f844c7egd59430c4b1b09586@mail.gmail.com> References: <1db0b2da0806140622k4f844c7egd59430c4b1b09586@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Aleksei Riikonen wrote: > I'd like to recommend that if people are gonna play MMORPGs, they try > out EVE Online instead of playing something like WoW. > If you do not currently play MMORPGs, I do *not* recommend EVE, as > computer games tend to be silly time sinks. But every intelligent > person who does waste time with MMORPGs, should certainly look into > it. > > Also, to you people building this Order you speak of; you might find > ideological allies in this EVE Online "guild" (actually they are > called corporations in EVE; it's a scifi world instead of fantasy): > http://www.eve-viv.net/ > And they mock the suggestion that advanced societies might disappear into virtual reality rather than eating the galaxy!! We can't get in there fast enough. BillK From pgptag at gmail.com Sat Jun 14 14:44:19 2008 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 16:44:19 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [wta-talk] Transhumanist MMORPGers In-Reply-To: References: <1db0b2da0806140622k4f844c7egd59430c4b1b09586@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <470a3c520806140744u439306bbu8884c50f1d7d6762@mail.gmail.com> On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 4:04 PM, BillK wrote: > On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Aleksei Riikonen wrote: >> I'd like to recommend that if people are gonna play MMORPGs, they try >> out EVE Online instead of playing something like WoW. > >> If you do not currently play MMORPGs, I do *not* recommend EVE, as >> computer games tend to be silly time sinks. But every intelligent >> person who does waste time with MMORPGs, should certainly look into >> it. >> >> Also, to you people building this Order you speak of; you might find >> ideological allies in this EVE Online "guild" (actually they are >> called corporations in EVE; it's a scifi world instead of fantasy): >> http://www.eve-viv.net/ >> > > > And they mock the suggestion that advanced societies might disappear > into virtual reality rather than eating the galaxy!! We can't get in > there fast enough. Thanks! I have been thinking of Eve Online for some time, and after reading this - and finding out that it does run an Mac, I will certainly try it. I have also tried Entropia Universe but find it a bit dull compared to WoW that is much more interesting. Watch for the next upgrade due this year though, at least the visuals should become much better. From thespike at satx.rr.com Sat Jun 14 16:46:28 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:46:28 -0500 Subject: [ExI] John Horgan and George Johnson on singularity In-Reply-To: <470a3c520806140744u439306bbu8884c50f1d7d6762@mail.gmail.co m> References: <1db0b2da0806140622k4f844c7egd59430c4b1b09586@mail.gmail.com> <470a3c520806140744u439306bbu8884c50f1d7d6762@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080614113320.0238a140@satx.rr.com> Two notable science writers tell each other why it's all "just science fiction": (Why is this regarded as a *criticism,* I often wonder? It's like saying, "Oh, television, microwaved meals, rockets to the Moon, atomic energy and weapons, life on other worlds--that's all just science fiction.") Mr. Johnson explains wearily that it must all be bunk because he wrote about just such ideas 25 years ago. And hey, look--it still hasn't happened! And if it did life would be *sooo boooorrrrring.* This in the same week that a petaflop computer is announced. But at least this was part of a discussion of the book I edited, YEAR MILLION, and Mr. Horgan's review of it in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Maybe some viewers and readers will be tempted to see what the book actually says... Damien Broderick From benboc at lineone.net Sat Jun 14 16:27:37 2008 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 17:27:37 +0100 Subject: [ExI] extropy-chat Digest, Vol 57, Issue 10 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4853F179.4070309@lineone.net> Subject: Re: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" Damien Broderick wrote: > At 11:26 PM 6/11/2008 +0000, BillK wrote: > >If nobody ever died, and life just goes on with no end, then there is > >less pressure to do stuff. They can always do it next year if they > >want to. > How do you know this? From all those sad cases of bone-idle immortals > in our midst from prehistory? > I can assure you that I feel a damned sight less pressure to do stuff > now that my body and brain are breaking down, and knowing that I'll > be dead meat in the next 5, 10 or 20 years--and if it's 20 years, > I'll probably be brain-dead meat anyway. That foul prospect corrodes > me, comrade, it does nothing to concentrate my mind wonderfully. > Damien Broderick Well said, Damien. Also, there's another aspect: What about the extended period of increasing debility that old age brings? I have some experience of being debilitated then being restored to good health again, and i can tell you, i know which state gives more 'meaning' to my life! Besides, surely it's up to each individual to decide what 'meaning' their own life has under different circumstances? This isn't something that can be decided on theoretical grounds, then extended over the whole population. ben zaiboc From sondre-list at bjellas.com Sat Jun 14 16:35:19 2008 From: sondre-list at bjellas.com (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Sondre_Bjell=E5s?=) Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 18:35:19 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanist MMORPGers References: <1db0b2da0806140622k4f844c7egd59430c4b1b09586@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7BC4B55E72A54D26B8CC8F33ABD680D3@GAMER> I used to be a beta-tester for EVE, but I can't find the time to play enough to make it worth the time ... Now, I only play Age of Conan on the PC and my wife plays World of Warcraft :-) When AoC comes to Xbox 360, then we'll get married within Age of Conan as we did in World of Warcraft on our 1-year anniversary. - Sondre -------------------------------------------------- From: "Aleksei Riikonen" Sent: Saturday, June 14, 2008 3:22 PM To: Cc: Subject: Re: [ExI] Transhumanist MMORPGers > On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 9:52 AM, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote: >> The foundation of the Order of Cosmic Engineers was announced at The >> Future of Religions/Religions of the Future conference in Second Life >> on June 5, 2008. There will be a launch event in World of Warcraft >> TODAY June 14, 2008, at noon EST, hosted by Bainbridge's WoW Science >> Guild. The Prospectus of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, >> collaboratively authored by the Order's founding members, and other >> parts of the website, will be online tomorrow June 15, 2008. >> >> See Bainbridge's convergentsystems wiki for information on the Order's >> launch at the Silvermoon Meeting, Saturday, June 14 noon server time. >> Please see the Earthen Ring US page for information on how to set up >> your WoW character to attend the event. In summary: you must choose >> the the North American server, Earthen Ring US, and your character >> must belong to the Horde. Europeans see here. >> >> See http://cosmeng.org/ >> >> We hope to see transhumanist WoWers today! > > I'd like to recommend that if people are gonna play MMORPGs, they try > out EVE Online instead of playing something like WoW. > > EVE Online certainly has by far the most demanding learning curve > among MMORPGs (I have never seen this disputed), and in a wholly > positive way; it's not fucked up design or anything like that that > makes it more challenging, just the depth and complexity of it all. No > other current MMORPG has an equally complex virtual economy (could > other MMORPG worlds non-hilariously employ a PhD economist putting out > quarterly reports?), or an equally rich political landscape of > competing player alliances, as the possibilities for PVP and the > infrastructural elements for empire building in EVE are from a > different plane of complexity than in typical MMORPGs. > > If you do not currently play MMORPGs, I do *not* recommend EVE, as > computer games tend to be silly time sinks. But every intelligent > person who does waste time with MMORPGs, should certainly look into > it. > > Also, to you people building this Order you speak of; you might find > ideological allies in this EVE Online "guild" (actually they are > called corporations in EVE; it's a scifi world instead of fantasy): > http://www.eve-viv.net/ > > -- > Aleksei Riikonen - http://www.iki.fi/aleksei > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From fauxever at sprynet.com Sat Jun 14 17:41:36 2008 From: fauxever at sprynet.com (Olga Bourlin) Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 10:41:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Lying for Jesus? References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com><200806131717.48779.kanzure@gmail.com><51ce64f10806131522o2e1d672al6a075e4f90f45640@mail.gmail.com> <200806131738.54041.kanzure@gmail.com> Message-ID: <003f01c8ce45$e534d7d0$6601a8c0@patrick4ezsk6z> I came upon this recently (although it was written months ago) - I thought this blog about the Antony Flew brouhaha was interesting: http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2007/11/antony-flew-bogus-book.html And, in a similar vein, here is latest story on Terry Pratchett (who has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/2094509/Terry-Pratchett-hints-he-may-have-found-God.html Olga From natasha at natasha.cc Sat Jun 14 18:08:40 2008 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 13:08:40 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Singularity Discussion - Human - AI - Takeoff In-Reply-To: <20080613225306.NFSD9858.hrndva-omta02.mail.rr.com@D840DTB1.maxmore.com> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com><200806131717.48779.kanzure@gmail.com><51ce64f10806131522o2e1d672al6a075e4f90f45640@mail.gmail.com><200806131738.54041.kanzure@gmail.com> <20080613225306.NFSD9858.hrndva-omta02.mail.rr.com@D840DTB1.maxmore.com> Message-ID: <000001c8ce49$ad22c290$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> Max wrote: > This thread ceased a while ago to be about my talk in Second Life > (and is not *yet* about the next one). Please retitle it more appropriately. Oh sorry! Guilty as charged. Keith, Michael and Bryan, please continue discussion if you are so inclined. Natasha From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Jun 14 18:00:26 2008 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (hkhenson) Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:00:26 -0700 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10806131522o2e1d672al6a075e4f90f45640@mail.gmail.co m> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <200806122111.30730.kanzure@gmail.com> <51ce64f10806131448p5c1c33a0r83bdec7a55f1acc4@mail.gmail.com> <200806131717.48779.kanzure@gmail.com> <51ce64f10806131522o2e1d672al6a075e4f90f45640@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <1213466585_2098@S3.cableone.net> At 03:22 PM 6/13/2008, Michael wrote: >I think it would benefit H+ as a whole if more transhumanists were >aware of Vinge's Event Horizon, and how it differs fundamentally >from Kurzweil's Singularity. It would be worth asking them if they think their descriptions of the singularity are significantly different. There are (as an example) a bunch of us who accept a wide variety of definitions of meme as equivalent. Keith From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Jun 14 21:25:21 2008 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (hkhenson) Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:25:21 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Singularity Discussion - Human - AI - Takeoff Message-ID: <1213478883_2412@s7.cableone.net> At 03:22 PM 6/13/2008, Michael wrote: >I think it would benefit H+ as a whole if more transhumanists were >aware of Vinge's Event Horizon, and how it differs fundamentally >from Kurzweil's Singularity. It would be worth asking them if they think their descriptions of the singularity are significantly different. There are (as an example) a bunch of us who accept a wide variety of definitions of meme as equivalent. Keith (per Natasha's request) From sondre-list at bjellas.com Sat Jun 14 16:31:14 2008 From: sondre-list at bjellas.com (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Sondre_Bjell=E5s?=) Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 18:31:14 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanist MMORPGers References: <1db0b2da0806140622k4f844c7egd59430c4b1b09586@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <2AD1E9A091EA40368A11614FBA4DE0AD@GAMER> I used to be a beta-tester for EVE, but I can't find the time to play enough to make it worth the time ... Now, I only play Age of Conan on the PC and my wife plays World of Warcraft :-) When AoC comes to Xbox 360, then we'll get married within Age of Conan as we did in World of Warcraft on our 1-year anniversary. - Sondre -------------------------------------------------- From: "Aleksei Riikonen" Sent: Saturday, June 14, 2008 3:22 PM To: Cc: Subject: Re: [ExI] Transhumanist MMORPGers > On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 9:52 AM, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote: >> The foundation of the Order of Cosmic Engineers was announced at The >> Future of Religions/Religions of the Future conference in Second Life >> on June 5, 2008. There will be a launch event in World of Warcraft >> TODAY June 14, 2008, at noon EST, hosted by Bainbridge's WoW Science >> Guild. The Prospectus of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, >> collaboratively authored by the Order's founding members, and other >> parts of the website, will be online tomorrow June 15, 2008. >> >> See Bainbridge's convergentsystems wiki for information on the Order's >> launch at the Silvermoon Meeting, Saturday, June 14 noon server time. >> Please see the Earthen Ring US page for information on how to set up >> your WoW character to attend the event. In summary: you must choose >> the the North American server, Earthen Ring US, and your character >> must belong to the Horde. Europeans see here. >> >> See http://cosmeng.org/ >> >> We hope to see transhumanist WoWers today! > > I'd like to recommend that if people are gonna play MMORPGs, they try > out EVE Online instead of playing something like WoW. > > EVE Online certainly has by far the most demanding learning curve > among MMORPGs (I have never seen this disputed), and in a wholly > positive way; it's not fucked up design or anything like that that > makes it more challenging, just the depth and complexity of it all. No > other current MMORPG has an equally complex virtual economy (could > other MMORPG worlds non-hilariously employ a PhD economist putting out > quarterly reports?), or an equally rich political landscape of > competing player alliances, as the possibilities for PVP and the > infrastructural elements for empire building in EVE are from a > different plane of complexity than in typical MMORPGs. > > If you do not currently play MMORPGs, I do *not* recommend EVE, as > computer games tend to be silly time sinks. But every intelligent > person who does waste time with MMORPGs, should certainly look into > it. > > Also, to you people building this Order you speak of; you might find > ideological allies in this EVE Online "guild" (actually they are > called corporations in EVE; it's a scifi world instead of fantasy): > http://www.eve-viv.net/ > > -- > Aleksei Riikonen - http://www.iki.fi/aleksei > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From max at maxmore.com Sat Jun 14 22:56:09 2008 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 17:56:09 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Unsolved Problems in Transhumanism Message-ID: <20080614225610.DUZH25150.hrndva-omta01.mail.rr.com@D840DTB1.maxmore.com> I promised to make available my notes for the talk in Second Life on June 8, 2008. Thanks to several people, here are links not only to the slides and notes, but also the chat log and audio and a report: The slides from the talk are here: http://www.maxmore.com/unsolved.ppt This document is here: http://www.maxmore.com/UnsolvedProblems.doc The log of the chat from the talk and report on talk are available here: http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/max_more_in_second_life_on_unsolved_problems_in_transhumanism/ The audio is here (almost complete): http://metaxlr8.com:81/maxmoresl080608audio.mp3 Max More, Ph.D. Strategic Philosopher www.maxmore.com max at maxmore.com From pgptag at gmail.com Sun Jun 15 08:49:22 2008 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:49:22 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silvermoon Meeting: Launch of the Order of Cosmic Engineers in World of Warcraft In-Reply-To: <470a3c520806132352t5327323bxf97bc66534cd2a9e@mail.gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806132352t5327323bxf97bc66534cd2a9e@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <470a3c520806150149t501d81c5t912f6b0e1f908498@mail.gmail.com> Links and pictures in http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/silvermoon_meeting_launch_of_the_order_of_cosmic_engineers_in_world_of_warc/ http://cosmeng.org/index.php/Silvermoon_Meeting The Order of Cosmic Engineers, pre- announced at The Future of Religions/Religions of the Future conference in Second Life on June 5, 2008, was launched yesterday June 14, 2008, at the Silvermoon Meeting in World of Warcraft. Read the Prospectus of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, collaboratively authored by the Order's founding members. See also Bainbridge's Cosmic Engineers wiki. A picture of the event is above, there are more picture and a chatlog here. I am very pleased to see that the first top blogger to comment on the launch of the Order has been one of my favorite writers. In an article about the Singularity, Charlie Stross writes: Now the rapture-nerds have indeed begun to codify their beliefs. Allow me to introduce you to the Order of Cosmic Engineers. It is their intention to "joyfully set out to permeate our universe with benign intelligence, building and spreading it from inner space to outer space and beyond." And they explain: The Order is, at the same time, a transhumanist association, a space advocacy group, a spiritual movement, a literary salon, a technology observatory, an idea factory, a virtual worlds development group, and a global community of persons willing to take an active role in building, in realizing a sunny future. As engineers, we aim to build what cannot be readily found. Adopting an engineering approach and attitude, we aim to turn this universe into a "magical" realm. There's a lot more where this came from ? indeed there's a whole huge prospectus, awaiting release next Sunday (which will be accessible here); Their formal launch event will be hosted by the Science Guild in World of Warcraft on June 14 at noon EST. I've seen an early draft of the prospectus, and it is indeed something special. Let's just say for now that I await its publication with interest: it's bad manners to critique an early draft of divine scripture before it's launched. See also the very interesting comments thread. From benboc at lineone.net Sun Jun 15 11:05:51 2008 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 12:05:51 +0100 Subject: [ExI] extropy-chat Digest, Vol 57, Issue 11 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4854F78F.7000003@lineone.net> Subject: Re: [ExI] "Death gives meaning to life?" From: "Stefano Vaj" wrote: On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 1:26 AM, BillK wrote: > > If you know that you only have a limited time here, then you have to > > consider what you would like to do with that time. >There again, "lifetime" has the curious feature of not following the >rule according to which abundance of a good leads to a lower values of >its unities. > >For sure being terminally ill or sentenced to death may focus your >mind, but in more general terms I would say that we did not start >thinking less of what to do with our time when our life expectancy >went from 30 years to 90. > >And unless we are speaking or real, literal eternity, I suspect that >90,000 rather than 90 would not change a thing. > >Stefano Vaj Actually, i think it would. For example, i like to tinker on my guitar. After viewing that video (and many others) of 'Tony Enamel' playing the guitar, i had mixed feelings. First, inspiration. Rapidly followed by frustration and the realisation that i will /never/ be that good, followed by the thought "but... hang on, if i had enough time....". 90,000 years would probably be enough for me to be as good a guitarist as i want to be, plus several other things. On the other hand, if i /knew/, beyond doubt, that 90 years was the maximum i had, i'd probably chuck the guitar away right now, and concentrate on things that i know there's a chance of achieving in that short time (or rather in less than that, as you have to allow a few decades for senile dementia, etc.) ben zaiboc From benboc at lineone.net Sun Jun 15 11:06:36 2008 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 12:06:36 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Groups In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4854F7BC.7060108@lineone.net> On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 10:15 PM, Anne Corwin wrote: > > The "join our camp!" thing is the sort of mentality that generally > > causes me to run away screaming from groups of people Hey, me too! We should form a group! ben zaiboc From mbb386 at main.nc.us Sun Jun 15 14:09:34 2008 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:09:34 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [ExI] Groups In-Reply-To: <4854F7BC.7060108@lineone.net> References: <4854F7BC.7060108@lineone.net> Message-ID: <1429.12.77.169.19.1213538974.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> > On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 10:15 PM, Anne Corwin > wrote: > >> > The "join our camp!" thing is the sort of mentality that generally > > > > causes me to run away screaming from groups of people > > Hey, me too! > > We should form a group! > Ha! I know this game. :) When I was at university, there were a number of us who banded together (after a fashion, in name only) to form the GDI... G*d D*mn Independents. The only thing I recall doing as a group (in 5 years of school) was once entering the SongFest, because one of the independents was a gifted pianist and a number of people enjoyed singing along to his playing during breaks. The startling thing was that we *won*! The fraternity and sorority folks were *outraged*! :))) I still remember the glee of that evening! We were astounded. Regards, MB ps. to date this event, you may enjoy knowing that we sang "Little Boxes" - I'm sure there is a more official name, but the song suited us well. From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sun Jun 15 18:13:04 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 20:13:04 +0200 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10806131458i309fe32bh548c4ae3cb4b3527@mail.gmail.com> References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com> <005701c8ca38$f3194cc0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> <1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net> <51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com> <1213337051_855@s8.cableone.net> <00b701c8cd58$d4597df0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> <51ce64f10806131458i309fe32bh548c4ae3cb4b3527@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <580930c20806151113k1aa5e827n9aa1609640a3caec@mail.gmail.com> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 11:58 PM, Michael Anissimov wrote: > This may be your preference, but it may turn out to simply be > technologically easier to create a self-improving AI first. Sort of like > how I might like to say that I'd prefer for fossil fuels to be replaced by > solar power, but replacing them with nuclear seems far simpler > technologically. So, are you suggesting that we should drop human enhancement efforts altogether, and, as our successor, concentrate exclusively on the development of a self-improving AI? Stefano Vaj From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Sun Jun 15 20:02:29 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:02:29 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Singularity Discussion - Human - AI - Takeoff Message-ID: <580930c20806151302v1fcd42f5pab8e4667935ae782@mail.gmail.com> In deference's to Max's request... ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Stefano Vaj Date: Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 8:13 PM Subject: Re: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday To: ExI chat list On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 11:58 PM, Michael Anissimov wrote: > This may be your preference, but it may turn out to simply be > technologically easier to create a self-improving AI first. Sort of like > how I might like to say that I'd prefer for fossil fuels to be replaced by > solar power, but replacing them with nuclear seems far simpler > technologically. So, are you suggesting that we should drop human enhancement efforts altogether, and, as our successor, concentrate exclusively on the development of a self-improving AI? Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Jun 15 19:34:15 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 12:34:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday References: <470a3c520806082325md78dd27u4f738126ba88c609@mail.gmail.com><005701c8ca38$f3194cc0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni><1213050678_838@s6.cableone.net><51ce64f10806121835n595b4dcdtbcf593a9fed85277@mail.gmail.com><1213337051_855@s8.cableone.net><00b701c8cd58$d4597df0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni><51ce64f10806131458i309fe32bh548c4ae3cb4b3527@mail.gmail.com> <580930c20806151113k1aa5e827n9aa1609640a3caec@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <02b901c8cf1e$cfc9da60$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Aren't you and Keith Henson paying attention!? MAX MORE DELIBERATELY WROTE TO STOP POSTING WITH THIS SUBJECT AND TO PLEASE CHANGE THE SUBJECT LINE. Sorry for the caps, and sorry for not changing the subject line, but this looks like the only way. Lee ----- Original Message ----- From: "Max More" To: "ExI chat list" Sent: Friday, June 13, 2008 3:53 PM Subject: [ExI] Please change subject title [was Re: MAX MORE in Second Life yesterday] > This thread ceased a while ago to be about my talk in Second Life > (and is not *yet* about the next one). Please retitle it more appropriately. > > Thanks, > > Max > > > Max More, Ph.D. > Strategic Philosopher > www.maxmore.com > max at maxmore.com From lcorbin at rawbw.com Sun Jun 15 20:40:31 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 13:40:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers References: <580930c20806110229p36d0067eh3413add4200c0611@mail.gmail.com> <012e01c8cbc3$4a5a6b00$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806120226rb652c3u3c63807612fcc47@mail.gmail.com> <01a401c8cca2$64984c50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806121015n4b4ea1e0u1ad0fa8454855ce1@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <02c101c8cf28$a259ba50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Stefano wrote > On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 5:35 PM, Lee Corbin wrote: > >> I think that I know what happened to Arthur Clark, Greg Egan, >> and many more (but didn't happen to the earlier Heinlein or Laumer). > > Arthur C. Clarke? Which novels to you refer to? and G?nther added, in regard to that same remark, > Could you share your thought, I would be interested? :-) Sorry for the late reply. I've been busy. But I've also been thinking a lot. I suspect that my conjecture, above, is *wrong*. I believe that I was thinking of Childhood's End, which had, by far, the most impact on me of any of Clarke's novels. (What was the golden age of science fiction? see answer below [1]) I was also thinking of a recent discussion with a friend about Rama. But Childhood's End shows a kind of final *triumph* of mankind, over the Karellan (i.e. the Overlords). But not by *our* efforts, that's for sure. By our very nature, it turns out. Perhaps here and in "Fountains of Paradise" the most that Clarke could be charged with is a relentless "putting humankind into its place", i.e., showing we're not such great stuff. I have always had a good explanation for just why he and probably other British SF writers are wont to do that. (See caveat below.) But even in Rama, Clarke can, I think, at most be charged with the old hideous "want to see? want to see? Want to see what's behind the curtain?? Sorry! No will do!". That had happened to me so often, especially on TV where in every episode of some series (long, long before the X-Files) we *almost* find out something interesting about aliens. I was already so incensed by this that by only seeing the advertisements on TV, I *knew* that "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" would be just more of the same frustrating shit, and I refused to go see it, and have not seen it to this day. (The movie "Final Countdown" (1980) was perhaps the worst. More about that if anyone is interested.) No, I must reserve my accusation of "Defeatist Science Fiction Writers" to certain novels of others, I guess. The worst example of all time was probably H.G. Well's "War of the Worlds", in which a very enterprising man wanted to never submit to the Martian invaders, form resistance parties, develop new methods, and fight them to the very end. But the protagonist and the author dismiss him as a crackpot. H.G. Wells was definitely no Horatio Alger (in more ways than just one, of course), and no Keith Laumer, or many others that could be named. Even in the 1960's I was struck by Keith Laumer. In some of his short stories, instead of having an ironic or neutral outcome, amazingly *great* things would happen to his characters. See his "Hybrid", the story about the Yanda Tree, for the best example. It was almost H+ science fiction, so positive and affirmative it is about the possibilities and potential for individual acquisition of new powers and perspective. Isn't there a discernable tendency in British and Australian SF writers against the "gung ho, can do"? Of an almost relative passivity? I explicitly exempt Damien Broderick's novels. The ones that come to mind show the protagonists overcoming obstacles and triumphing most gratifyingly. If I am right about this issue, then of course that could be explained by his allegiance to general extropian or transhumanist philosophy. Now three caveats are quickly in order. One, by no means are *all* British, Australian, or New Zealand writers so indicted by me, and neither are all the stories of any one of them. I'm only speaking of a notable tendency, that's all. Two, very often a depressing, sad, and horrific failure is an aesthetically preferable and even necessary outcome. I will only mention the name of a great example SF book in a footnote [2] to avoid spoiling it for any reader. If you think you know what I mean, or have read books by Disch, then study the footnote. Three, defeatism is a general literary phenomenon. Something very bad happened to western culture around 1900. An example is Joseph Conrad's novel "Victory". I think it's a great story, superbly told. But in the very last scene, Joseph Conrad deliberately and without any evident reason destroys the life of one of the two major protagonists, and snatches away any hope of happiness from the other. It's just sick. The novel would be basically unchanged if he had made just this one tiny change. In at least one 1891 novel he is also, perhaps, exhibiting this unfortunately phenomenon. Defeatism stinks. Lee [1] The golden age of science fiction is, of course, 12. [2] The science fiction novel I'm thinking of is "sediconeg eht", by Mr. samoth m. hcsid. From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Jun 16 00:08:31 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 19:08:31 -0500 Subject: [ExI] "Heavy Industry--1995" Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080615185847.0232a3f0@satx.rr.com> Analog cover, 1961, nearly half a century ago: And here we are 13 years beyond 1995, thinking about... uh, going to the Moon, someday. Maybe fixing the orbital telescope 600 km overhead if we can bear to take the risk. I wonder when we'd put the [guesstimate] heavy industry date now? 2025? I doubt it. 2045? 2061? (Robots allowed.) Damien Broderick From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Jun 16 01:00:07 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 20:00:07 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers In-Reply-To: <02c101c8cf28$a259ba50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <580930c20806110229p36d0067eh3413add4200c0611@mail.gmail.com> <012e01c8cbc3$4a5a6b00$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806120226rb652c3u3c63807612fcc47@mail.gmail.com> <01a401c8cca2$64984c50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806121015n4b4ea1e0u1ad0fa8454855ce1@mail.gmail.com> <02c101c8cf28$a259ba50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080615195150.02295688@satx.rr.com> At 01:40 PM 6/15/2008 -0700, Lee wrote: >Isn't there a discernable tendency in British and Australian SF writers >against the "gung ho, can do"? Of an almost relative passivity? I explicitly >exempt Damien Broderick's novels. The ones that come to mind show >the protagonists overcoming obstacles and triumphing most gratifyingly. >If I am right about this issue, then of course that could be explained by >his allegiance to general extropian or transhumanist philosophy. In general terms, no doubt some sort of conjunction is valid, but it's worth noting that when my first fiction was being published Max More had just been born... :) Other Aussie sf writers have an optimistic stance. Sean McMullen, for example. Terry Dowling, despite a certain fin de si?cle mournfulness. Russell Blackford. You might not know all these writers, which is a shame. (Curiously, it strikes me that they/we all have PhDs, although none in the sciences. Striving is a very Aussie characteristic, despite the laid-back beach culture.) Damien Broderick From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Jun 16 05:04:52 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:04:52 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Alien origin for life on Earth? Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080616000213.0228dca0@satx.rr.com> Agen?e France-Presse [] PARIS: Genetic material from outer space found in a meteorite in Australia may well have played a key role in the origin of life on Earth, according to a new international study. European and U.S. scientists have proved for the first time that two bits of genetic coding, called nucleobases, contained in the meteor fragment, are truly extraterrestrial. Previous studies had suggested that the space rocks, which hit Earth some 40 years ago, might have been contaminated upon impact. Both of the molecules identified, uracil and xanthine, "are present in our DNA and RNA," said lead author Zita Martins, a researcher at Imperial College, London. [this is misleading; see below] RNA, or ribonucleic acid, is another key part of the genetic coding that makes up our bodies. These molecules would also have been essential to the still-mysterious alchemy that somehow gave rise, some four billion years ago, to life itself. "We know that meteorites very similar to the Murchison meteorite, which is the one we analysed, were delivering the building blocks of life to Earth 3.8 to 4.5 billion years ago," Martins said. Alien carbon Competing theories suggest that nucleobases were synthesised closer to home, but Martins counters that the atmospheric conditions of early Earth would have rendered that process difficult or impossible. A team of European and U.S. scientists showed that the two types of molecules in the Australian meteorite contained a heavy form of carbon ? carbon 13 ? which could only have been formed in space. "We believe early life may have adopted nucleobases from meteoric fragments for use in genetic coding, enabling them to pass on their successful features to subsequent generations," Martins said. If so, this would have been the start of an evolutionary process leading over billions of years to all the flora and fauna ? including human beings ? in existence today. Are we alone? The study, published in Earth Planetary Science Letters, also has implications for life on other planets. "Because meteorites represent leftover materials from the formation of the solar system, the key components of life ? including nucleobases ? could be widespread in the cosmos," said co-author Mark Sephton, also at Imperial College, London. "As more and more of life's raw materials are discovered in objects from space, the possibility of life springing forth wherever the right chemistry is present becomes more likely," he said. Uracil is an organic compound found in RNA, where it binds in a genetic base pair with another molecule, adenine. Xanthine is not directly part of RNA or DNA, but participates in a series of chemical reactions inside the RNA of cells. The two types of nucleobases and the ratio of light-to-heavy carbon molecules were identified through gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, technologies that were not available during earlier analyses of the now-famous meteorite. Even so, said Martins, the process was extremely laborious and time-consuming ? one reason it had not previously been carried out by other scientists. From dagonweb at gmail.com Mon Jun 16 05:34:23 2008 From: dagonweb at gmail.com (Dagon Gmail) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 07:34:23 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanist MMORPGers In-Reply-To: <2AD1E9A091EA40368A11614FBA4DE0AD@GAMER> References: <1db0b2da0806140622k4f844c7egd59430c4b1b09586@mail.gmail.com> <2AD1E9A091EA40368A11614FBA4DE0AD@GAMER> Message-ID: I have tried Eve online, found it pretty damn challenging. Alone I wouldn't try it (none of my friends wants to play it) but in a team, it would be amazing and I could easily waste 20-30 hours per week on it. I don't expect to return to eve, my schedule is pretty filling up the next months, but if I would I would invite everyone to have a serious look when they implement "ambulation" - this feature is DESIGNED for groups to have meetings, discuss strategies and roleplay. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abMEVENz1jQ On 6/14/08, Sondre Bjell?s wrote: > I used to be a beta-tester for EVE, but I can't find the time to play enough > to make it worth the time ... > > Now, I only play Age of Conan on the PC and my wife plays World of Warcraft > :-) When AoC comes to Xbox 360, then we'll get married within Age of Conan > as we did in World of Warcraft on our 1-year anniversary. > > > - Sondre > > -------------------------------------------------- > From: "Aleksei Riikonen" > Sent: Saturday, June 14, 2008 3:22 PM > To: > Cc: > Subject: Re: [ExI] Transhumanist MMORPGers > >> On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 9:52 AM, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote: >>> The foundation of the Order of Cosmic Engineers was announced at The >>> Future of Religions/Religions of the Future conference in Second Life >>> on June 5, 2008. There will be a launch event in World of Warcraft >>> TODAY June 14, 2008, at noon EST, hosted by Bainbridge's WoW Science >>> Guild. The Prospectus of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, >>> collaboratively authored by the Order's founding members, and other >>> parts of the website, will be online tomorrow June 15, 2008. >>> >>> See Bainbridge's convergentsystems wiki for information on the Order's >>> launch at the Silvermoon Meeting, Saturday, June 14 noon server time. >>> Please see the Earthen Ring US page for information on how to set up >>> your WoW character to attend the event. In summary: you must choose >>> the the North American server, Earthen Ring US, and your character >>> must belong to the Horde. Europeans see here. >>> >>> See http://cosmeng.org/ >>> >>> We hope to see transhumanist WoWers today! >> >> I'd like to recommend that if people are gonna play MMORPGs, they try >> out EVE Online instead of playing something like WoW. >> >> EVE Online certainly has by far the most demanding learning curve >> among MMORPGs (I have never seen this disputed), and in a wholly >> positive way; it's not fucked up design or anything like that that >> makes it more challenging, just the depth and complexity of it all. No >> other current MMORPG has an equally complex virtual economy (could >> other MMORPG worlds non-hilariously employ a PhD economist putting out >> quarterly reports?), or an equally rich political landscape of >> competing player alliances, as the possibilities for PVP and the >> infrastructural elements for empire building in EVE are from a >> different plane of complexity than in typical MMORPGs. >> >> If you do not currently play MMORPGs, I do *not* recommend EVE, as >> computer games tend to be silly time sinks. But every intelligent >> person who does waste time with MMORPGs, should certainly look into >> it. >> >> Also, to you people building this Order you speak of; you might find >> ideological allies in this EVE Online "guild" (actually they are >> called corporations in EVE; it's a scifi world instead of fantasy): >> http://www.eve-viv.net/ >> >> -- >> Aleksei Riikonen - http://www.iki.fi/aleksei >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From pgptag at gmail.com Mon Jun 16 06:14:14 2008 From: pgptag at gmail.com (Giu1i0 Pri5c0) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 08:14:14 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanist MMORPGers In-Reply-To: References: <1db0b2da0806140622k4f844c7egd59430c4b1b09586@mail.gmail.com> <2AD1E9A091EA40368A11614FBA4DE0AD@GAMER> Message-ID: <470a3c520806152314h73584882m56f6d9afad3a923a@mail.gmail.com> On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 7:34 AM, Dagon Gmail wrote: > I have tried Eve online, found it pretty damn challenging. Alone I > wouldn't try it (none of my friends wants to play it) but in a team, > it would be amazing and I could easily waste 20-30 hours per week on > it. I don't expect to return to eve, my schedule is pretty filling up > the next months, but if I would I would invite everyone to have a > serious look when they implement "ambulation" - this feature is > DESIGNED for groups to have meetings, discuss strategies and roleplay. > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abMEVENz1jQ This looks real great, you have persuaded me. I will make time in the summer to give Eve a serious exploration From mbb386 at main.nc.us Mon Jun 16 10:29:33 2008 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 06:29:33 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [ExI] "Heavy Industry--1995" In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20080615185847.0232a3f0@satx.rr.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20080615185847.0232a3f0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <1360.12.77.169.68.1213612173.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> > Analog cover, 1961, nearly half a century ago: > > > > Ah. :( And I look at my ancient SF books and wonder what happened. James White: Second Ending James Blish: The Seedling Stars We've lost our way? Regards, MB From aleksei at iki.fi Mon Jun 16 10:56:54 2008 From: aleksei at iki.fi (Aleksei Riikonen) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:56:54 +0300 Subject: [ExI] Transhumanist MMORPGers In-Reply-To: <470a3c520806152314h73584882m56f6d9afad3a923a@mail.gmail.com> References: <1db0b2da0806140622k4f844c7egd59430c4b1b09586@mail.gmail.com> <2AD1E9A091EA40368A11614FBA4DE0AD@GAMER> <470a3c520806152314h73584882m56f6d9afad3a923a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <1db0b2da0806160356u1c834220gb8bb1aa23f8060f2@mail.gmail.com> On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 9:14 AM, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote: > On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 7:34 AM, Dagon Gmail wrote: >> I have tried Eve online, found it pretty damn challenging. Alone I >> wouldn't try it (none of my friends wants to play it) but in a team, >> it would be amazing and I could easily waste 20-30 hours per week on >> it. I don't expect to return to eve, my schedule is pretty filling up >> the next months, but if I would I would invite everyone to have a >> serious look when they implement "ambulation" - this feature is >> DESIGNED for groups to have meetings, discuss strategies and roleplay. >> >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abMEVENz1jQ > > This looks real great, you have persuaded me. I will make time in the > summer to give Eve a serious exploration And when any people reading this who now decide to give EVE a try are in the phase where they start looking for a team, feel free to email me for advice. (Actually I would probably just recommend the corporation I already mentioned earlier; I was involved in it's early days a couple of years ago.) Also if anyone wants a couple of million ISK (the currency of the Eve universe) to smooth out their noob days, that's available from me as well (as long as I don't get several hundred requests, which of course is rather unlikely). I played Eve actively at an earlier point, and have a multibillionaire character left over from those days, living off interest in the Eve universe. (By "living off interest" I mean that in EVE, you're allowed to pay your subscription with ISK instead of real-world money via an allowed form of RMT (though I think they officially deny it's RMT), which means that successful players can play the game for free in perpetuity. One gets the interest by investing in player-run banks or IPOs within the virtual economy, which is indeed developed enough that there are banks and stock markets and so on.) -- Aleksei Riikonen - http://www.iki.fi/aleksei From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Jun 16 11:40:44 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 06:40:44 -0500 Subject: [ExI] "Heavy Industry--1995" In-Reply-To: <1360.12.77.169.68.1213612173.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20080615185847.0232a3f0@satx.rr.com> <1360.12.77.169.68.1213612173.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080616063307.024c35d0@satx.rr.com> At 06:29 AM 6/16/2008 -0400, MB wrote: >And I look at my ancient SF books and wonder what happened. > >James White: Second Ending >James Blish: The Seedling Stars > >We've lost our way? Well, those books are set considerably in the future, no? And even for "near futures" there can be setbacks of a few decades. Besides, I think Analog editor John Campbell chose to label his cover art 1995 rather than 2061 (a century being one standard trope) because in 1961 that was safely inside the lifetime of most of his readers. Like the singularity estimates today, usually 25-35 years from "now"... Damien Broderick From nebathenemi at yahoo.co.uk Mon Jun 16 12:51:03 2008 From: nebathenemi at yahoo.co.uk (Tom Nowell) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:51:03 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <907629.91999.qm@web27007.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> With regards to defeatism being common amongst British and Australian SF writers, it might be down to a difference in character: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFvz5mCH4TU&NR=1 about the 1:18 mark "I love Americans, cos you're DREAMERS, ain't'cha?" I disagree with the idea that literature became more pessimistic around 1900 - what we in modern times consider "classics of English Literature" are full of pessimists. Shakespeare's Tragedies are usually regarded as his greatest works, and Charles Dickens reflected the worst of Victorian London. Great Expectations - what a happy title for book, suggesting positive outcomes, as Pip gets a scholarship so he can make something of himself. Alas, he ends up loveless, Miss Haversham is bitter to the end, and Magwidge gets sent back to jail for the crime of returning from Australia. Certainly, the world wars each spawned generations of pessimist writers. I sometimes wonder why our modern age has so many pessimists, when we live in a time of greater material satisfaction than any other, and with the ingenuity to find a way out of the holes we dig for ourselves. Maybe people find it hard to believe in techno-optimism after nuclear power (From "too cheap to meter" to "the costs of decommisioning will be big, and who wants the storage facility in their backyard"), space (from "a brave frontier" to that place where people stick their communication satellites, and occasionally a shuttle crew dies in the course of duty) and modern pharmaceuticals (from a promise of colossal health to things like thalidomide, and suicides from fluoxetine). I think there's always been a pessimist strand in SF. Certainly, the proto-SF of "Frankenstein" is based on a nightmare of a creation going wrong, and "Gulliver's travels" (which I've seen labelled as proto-SF) has a long strain of weariness at human folly throughout. While Jules Verne was optimistic, HG Well's wasn't. Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" is a dystopian vision of human biotechnology, and Carel Kapek (the man who gave us the word "robot" from the original Czech usage) used "RUR" and "The War with the newts" to portray a bleak future if people continued to exploit those they saw as "Other" or lesser. These examples are all before world war II, and the ensuing explosion of SF magazines and books. After WWII, SF was bigger, but the atomic bomb brought to SF visions of world annihilation. I suspect in the longer view of things, it may be that the techno-optimism of the 50s and 60s may be seen as an aberration against a long term trend. Tom __________________________________________________________ Sent from Yahoo! Mail. A Smarter Email http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Jun 16 13:44:30 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:44:30 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers In-Reply-To: <02c101c8cf28$a259ba50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <580930c20806110229p36d0067eh3413add4200c0611@mail.gmail.com> <012e01c8cbc3$4a5a6b00$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806120226rb652c3u3c63807612fcc47@mail.gmail.com> <01a401c8cca2$64984c50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806121015n4b4ea1e0u1ad0fa8454855ce1@mail.gmail.com> <02c101c8cf28$a259ba50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <580930c20806160644m7feb8476t15e0d83d55aae724@mail.gmail.com> On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 10:40 PM, Lee Corbin wrote: > Stefano wrote > No, I must reserve my accusation of "Defeatist Science Fiction Writers" > to certain novels of others, I guess. > Thank you for the insights on Clarke. I will check to what Italian titles Childhood's End and Fountains of Paradise correspond, and read them if I have not yet. Concerning the broader issue, it is true you would be hard pressed to find a transhumanist who is not and has never been a avid SF reader, and the genre is often and automatically considered close as a whole to H+ in public perception. On the other hand, it gave me pause my recent reading of Technophobia!: Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technologyby Daniel Dinello, where the author, who is a proud technophobe and neoluddite himself, argues with a very extensive and persuasive range of exemple that science fiction's legacy is a grand, single warning, indictment and condemnation of any transhuman temptation. Of course, very important exceptions remains, such as Heinlein or Anderson, but I wonder if we do not often find ourselves in SF novels and movies meanings and inspirations that are radically opposite to those intended by their authors and directors... Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Mon Jun 16 13:49:25 2008 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:49:25 +1000 Subject: [ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers In-Reply-To: <01a401c8cca2$64984c50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <580930c20806110229p36d0067eh3413add4200c0611@mail.gmail.com> <012e01c8cbc3$4a5a6b00$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806120226rb652c3u3c63807612fcc47@mail.gmail.com> <01a401c8cca2$64984c50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: Pessimism, defeatism, self-doubt and so on can be for the better. The great monsters of history rarely suffered from these problems. -- Stathis Papaioannou From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Jun 16 14:03:40 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:03:40 +0200 Subject: [ExI] "Heavy Industry--1995" In-Reply-To: <1360.12.77.169.68.1213612173.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20080615185847.0232a3f0@satx.rr.com> <1360.12.77.169.68.1213612173.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> Message-ID: <580930c20806160703j7e657d94qe64bc35f1e6d6f11@mail.gmail.com> On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 12:29 PM, MB wrote: > We've lost our way? > There are serious arguments according to which technological progress may have not slowed down yet, but at least its *acceleration* would, the main exponential exception remaining Moore's law and everything directly or indirectly connected with it. This is a discomforting thought, but at least it calls for a higher degree of commitment from individuals and governments, and represents one better reason for the existence of transhumanism as such than the idea of having a tea club of cheeleaders applauding from the aisles "inevitable" developments, if not even considering the idea of delaying them... Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kanzure at gmail.com Mon Jun 16 14:21:21 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:21:21 -0500 Subject: [ExI] "Heavy Industry--1995" In-Reply-To: <580930c20806160703j7e657d94qe64bc35f1e6d6f11@mail.gmail.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20080615185847.0232a3f0@satx.rr.com> <1360.12.77.169.68.1213612173.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <580930c20806160703j7e657d94qe64bc35f1e6d6f11@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200806160921.22007.kanzure@gmail.com> On Monday 16 June 2008, Stefano Vaj wrote: > This is a discomforting thought, but at least it calls for a higher > degree of commitment from individuals and governments, and represents > one better reason for the existence of transhumanism as such than the > idea of having a tea club of cheeleaders applauding from the aisles > "inevitable" developments, if not even considering the idea of > delaying them... Woah, what? Is that what you think transhumans are? Cheerleaders? - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Jun 16 14:29:25 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:29:25 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers In-Reply-To: <907629.91999.qm@web27007.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> References: <907629.91999.qm@web27007.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <580930c20806160729r4213409la74ea1465554642a@mail.gmail.com> On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 2:51 PM, Tom Nowell wrote: > I disagree with the idea that literature became more pessimistic around > 1900 - what we in modern times consider "classics of English Literature" are > full of pessimists. Shakespeare's Tragedies are usually regarded as his > greatest works, and Charles Dickens reflected the worst of Victorian London. > Great Expectations - what a happy title for book, suggesting positive > outcomes, as Pip gets a scholarship so he can make something of himself. > Alas, he ends up loveless, Miss Haversham is bitter to the end, and Magwidge > gets sent back to jail for the crime of returning from Australia. There is another important angle. What is pessimism and what is optimism? Is it really "optimist" from our point of view to see, e.g, old-fashioned, perhaps neoluddite, forces defeat and destroy - for their own good, needless to say - some sort of posthumans, with the author obviously expecting the reader to rejoice? On the contrary, a writer may perfectly sympathise with H+ values or heroes, and qualify as a transhumanist himself, even though in his fiction they happen to be overcome by an adverse fate. 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URL: From natasha at natasha.cc Mon Jun 16 15:00:28 2008 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:00:28 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers In-Reply-To: <580930c20806160644m7feb8476t15e0d83d55aae724@mail.gmail.com> References: <580930c20806110229p36d0067eh3413add4200c0611@mail.gmail.com><012e01c8cbc3$4a5a6b00$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677><580930c20806120226rb652c3u3c63807612fcc47@mail.gmail.com><01a401c8cca2$64984c50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677><580930c20806121015n4b4ea1e0u1ad0fa8454855ce1@mail.gmail.com><02c101c8cf28$a259ba50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806160644m7feb8476t15e0d83d55aae724@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <005b01c8cfc1$b7727af0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> Stefano wrote: >Concerning the broader issue, it is true you would be hard pressed to find a transhumanist who is not and has never been a avid SF >reader, and the genre is often and automatically considered close as a whole to H+ in public perception. I have to raise my hand. I am not an avid reader of SF and my knowledge of SF is weak, to say the least. But being a media artist was one way to look at all sorts of possibilities for the future - especially during the Electronic Art era which was a bit like SF in action. Natasha -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Mon Jun 16 15:12:47 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:12:47 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers In-Reply-To: <580930c20806160644m7feb8476t15e0d83d55aae724@mail.gmail.co m> References: <580930c20806110229p36d0067eh3413add4200c0611@mail.gmail.com> <012e01c8cbc3$4a5a6b00$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806120226rb652c3u3c63807612fcc47@mail.gmail.com> <01a401c8cca2$64984c50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806121015n4b4ea1e0u1ad0fa8454855ce1@mail.gmail.com> <02c101c8cf28$a259ba50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806160644m7feb8476t15e0d83d55aae724@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080616100045.023827e0@satx.rr.com> At 03:44 PM 6/16/2008 +0200, Stefano wrote of: >Daniel Dinello, where the author, who is a proud technophobe and >neoluddite himself, argues with a very extensive and persuasive >range of exemple that science fiction's legacy is a grand, single >warning, indictment and condemnation of any transhuman temptation. This is nonsense. I see at amazon he's praised for his extensive bibliography; I have to wonder how much of it is sci-fi (mostly drivel) and how much sf (the pure quill). But-- >Of course, very important exceptions remains, such as Heinlein or >Anderson, but I wonder if we do not often find ourselves in SF >novels and movies meanings and inspirations that are radically >opposite to those intended by their authors and directors... It's obvious that one major device available to the astute sf writer or editor (and about the only one available to the dickheads) is: given novum X, what can go wrong as a result? Who gets hurt by this? It's a classic narrative ploy in a commercial market. On top of that, there's the dystopian strain running through and adjacent to sf, where bulking up the aspects of current trends we dislike makes for an exciting tale with added moralizing vitamins for those who wish to feel improved. For all his madcap energy, Phil Dick did this a lot, which makes it easy to conscript and bastardize/dumb-down his stories into action movies full of Bad Things coming to get us, and at the same time hail and canonize him from within an academy where the word "anxiety" remains a touchstone to Deep Thought. Damien Broderick From max at maxmore.com Mon Jun 16 16:13:10 2008 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:13:10 -0500 Subject: [ExI] "Heavy Industry--1995" In-Reply-To: <1360.12.77.169.68.1213612173.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20080615185847.0232a3f0@satx.rr.com> <1360.12.77.169.68.1213612173.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> Message-ID: <20080616161311.HBYW25150.hrndva-omta01.mail.rr.com@D840DTB1.maxmore.com> At 05:29 AM 6/16/2008, you wrote: > > Analog cover, 1961, nearly half a century ago: > > > > > > > >Ah. :( And I look at my ancient SF books and wonder what happened. > >James White: Second Ending >James Blish: The Seedling Stars > >We've lost our way? Whoa, who's this "we", bub? ;-) I suspect I speak for many in saying that I never lost my way -- NASA and others just stood on our toes and slowed us down. BTW, talking of SF, yesterday I finally made an exception to my "no buying SF books" rule and bought Damien's Transcension. Max From andres at thoughtware.tv Mon Jun 16 16:23:54 2008 From: andres at thoughtware.tv (Andres Colon) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:23:54 -0400 Subject: [ExI] How to build a quantum eavesdropper Message-ID: In the cat and mouse game of preparing and eavesdropping on secret messages, quantum encryption trumps all. At least, that's what we've been told. The truth is a little more complex. Quantum key distribution, the quantum technique by which a classical encryption key can be transferred, is perfectly secure in theory. In practice, here are a number of loopholes that can give an eavesdropper a grandstand view of the conversation. Article: http://arxivblog.com/?p=469 Proposal: http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.1778 Found Via: Arxivblog.com | KurzweilAi.NET| Thoughtware.TV Andr?s President of Thoughtware.TV -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkhenson at rogers.com Mon Jun 16 19:33:21 2008 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (hkhenson) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:33:21 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Radically opposite was Defeatist In-Reply-To: <580930c20806160644m7feb8476t15e0d83d55aae724@mail.gmail.co m> References: <580930c20806110229p36d0067eh3413add4200c0611@mail.gmail.com> <012e01c8cbc3$4a5a6b00$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806120226rb652c3u3c63807612fcc47@mail.gmail.com> <01a401c8cca2$64984c50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806121015n4b4ea1e0u1ad0fa8454855ce1@mail.gmail.com> <02c101c8cf28$a259ba50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806160644m7feb8476t15e0d83d55aae724@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <1213644963_8763@s6.cableone.net> At 06:44 AM 6/16/2008, Stefano Vaj wrote: snip >Of course, very important exceptions remains, such as Heinlein or >Anderson, but I wonder if we do not often find ourselves in SF >novels and movies meanings and inspirations that are radically >opposite to those intended by their authors and directors... In the context of an almost depopulated post singularity world I wrote a flashback chapter to show how this situation had come about. Some of you have read it. http://www.terasemjournals.org/GN0202/henson.html It was intended as a depiction of a tragedy--where humans are seduced out of existence. Heck, an *animal* inherits their village. But the transhumanists who have read the story have all taken it as a triumph even some who have been warned about the story's intent. Understand, I *work* for this kind of future. I also consider it unavoidable and there to be worse fates. But it's still a tragedy. Keith PS. The world would have been completely depopulated, my guess on the most likely future, but you can't have a story without characters. From michaelanissimov at gmail.com Mon Jun 16 20:49:07 2008 From: michaelanissimov at gmail.com (Michael Anissimov) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:49:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] self-improving AI Message-ID: <51ce64f10806161349k199501a1pfc1be096663bb88@mail.gmail.com> On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 11:13 AM, Stefano Vaj wrote: > > So, are you suggesting that we should drop human enhancement efforts > altogether, and, as our successor, concentrate exclusively on the > development of a self-improving AI? > I see self-improving AI as potentially the easiest path to make radical (and safe) human enhancement available to everyone. You've been a transhumanist for a while -- is this idea new? -- Michael Anissimov -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Jun 16 20:56:34 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 22:56:34 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20080616100045.023827e0@satx.rr.com> References: <580930c20806110229p36d0067eh3413add4200c0611@mail.gmail.com> <012e01c8cbc3$4a5a6b00$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806120226rb652c3u3c63807612fcc47@mail.gmail.com> <01a401c8cca2$64984c50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806121015n4b4ea1e0u1ad0fa8454855ce1@mail.gmail.com> <02c101c8cf28$a259ba50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806160644m7feb8476t15e0d83d55aae724@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20080616100045.023827e0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <580930c20806161356xe82fa59x3f2220465e5a02cb@mail.gmail.com> On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 5:12 PM, Damien Broderick wrote: > For all his madcap energy, Phil Dick did this a lot, > which makes it easy to conscript and bastardize/dumb-down his stories > into action movies full of Bad Things coming to get us, and at the > same time hail and canonize him from within an academy where the word > "anxiety" remains a touchstone to Deep Thought. > Interestingly, however, the "meaning" of Dick's novels may be easily reversed in their cinematic versions. For instance, Do Androids Dream of Plastic Sheeps? is definitely anti-tech, but my grasp of Blade Runner is that replicants are the tragic heroes most of people are going to identify with... Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Jun 16 21:01:36 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:01:36 +0200 Subject: [ExI] self-improving AI In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10806161349k199501a1pfc1be096663bb88@mail.gmail.com> References: <51ce64f10806161349k199501a1pfc1be096663bb88@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <580930c20806161401t2da3a990rec2d47e15d1cc878@mail.gmail.com> On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 10:49 PM, Michael Anissimov < michaelanissimov at gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 11:13 AM, Stefano Vaj > wrote: > >> >> So, are you suggesting that we should drop human enhancement efforts >> altogether, and, as our successor, concentrate exclusively on the >> development of a self-improving AI? >> > > I see self-improving AI as potentially the easiest path to make radical > (and safe) human enhancement available to everyone. You've been a > transhumanist for a while -- is this idea new? > > I was referring to entirely non-human - whatever one may mean with that - AIs, as opposed to biological or cyborg-like enhancement or augmentation of the human species. Personally, I am not overly concerned with the issue, but I appreciate that for some of us the distinction may be of some importance. Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Mon Jun 16 21:17:08 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:17:08 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Californian boffins find Elixir of Eternal Youth Message-ID: <580930c20806161417j488a7fb6m2b79c3f2c320670a@mail.gmail.com> "Boffins" in inglese inglese vuol dire "scienziati"... Californian boffins find Elixir of Eternal YouthFor mice only. Catherine Zeta Jones not involvedBy Lewis Page ? More by this author Published Monday 16th June 2008 09:56 GMT ------------------------------ Mouse-molesting boffins in California have used biochemical signals to rejuvenate elderly, knackered bodily tissues in a fashion normally only achievable by youngsters. However, the scientists insist that they have not yet achieved an immortality drug, and if they had it would only be for mice. "We're not at a point where we're ready to inject ourselves with [this stuff]" said Dr Morgan Carlson. Carlson's research was overseen by Irina Conboy, associate prof at UC Berkeley. There doesn't seem to be any doubt that the two boffins are in fact looking for an immortality drug: Conboy has described her researchas "Pathways to the Fountain of Youth". The long-sought elixir of eternal life may not yet be in our grasp, but Conboy and Carlson have managed something promising enough to get them published in *Nature*, perhaps the most prestigious boffinry journal. It seems that when we're young, the stem cells in our bodies constantly repair and reinvigorate us. When we get old, this stops happening and pretty soon people are going through your stuff. "We don't realize it, but as we grow our bodies are constantly being remodeled," according to Conboy. "We are constantly falling apart, but we don't notice it much when we're young because we're always being restored. As we age, our stem cells are prevented, through chemical signals, from doing their jobs." Apparently one can revitalise stem cells by putting them in the right chemical environment. "When old tissue is placed in an environment of young blood, the stem cells behave as if they are young again," according to the Berkeley press release - in a process not unlike that undergone by wrinkly old Hollywood stars placed in an environment of Catherine Zeta Jones. Essentially, the Californian researchers were able to persuade muscle tissues in some mice that they were young again. We didn't entirely follow how they did it. "Interestingly, activated Notch competes with activated pSmad3 for binding to the regulatory regions of the same CDK inhibitors in the stem cell," said Professor Conboy. That certainly is interesting. "We found that Notch is capable of physically kicking off pSmad3 from the promoters for the CDK inhibitors within the stem cell's nucleus, which" - as any fool would realise - "tells us that a precise manipulation of the balance of these pathways would allow the ability to control stem cell responses." Diddling with Notch and pSmad3 levels using "an established method of RNA interference" allowed Conboy and Carlson to manipulate TGF-beta proteins and fire up the dormant stem cells of a group of elderly mice. The octogenarian murines "showed levels of cellular regeneration that were comparable to their much younger peers", apparently. But people shouldn't just start swigging down Notch, pSmad3 and TGF-beta at random. Cellular regeneration, out of hand, is sometimes just another name for cancer. Still, the Californian brainboxes seem cautiously optimistic. "When we are young, there is an optimal balance between Notch and TGF-beta," according to Conboy. "We need to find out what the levels of these chemicals are in the young so we can calibrate the system when we're older. If we can do that, we could rejuvenate tissue repair for a very long time." One thing's for sure - all this could have serious consequences for the mighty Japanese robotics industry, currently tooling up to make billions looking after the increasingly wrinkly populace of the Land of the Rising Sun. The Berkeley elixir-of-youth researchers had best watch their backs. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mbb386 at main.nc.us Mon Jun 16 23:28:35 2008 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:28:35 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [ExI] "Heavy Industry--1995" In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20080616063307.024c35d0@satx.rr.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20080615185847.0232a3f0@satx.rr.com> <1360.12.77.169.68.1213612173.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <7.0.1.0.2.20080616063307.024c35d0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <1574.12.77.169.30.1213658915.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> > > Well, those books are set considerably in the future, no? And even > for "near futures" there can be setbacks of a few decades. Indeed they are, but are we even on that road now? Second Ending has at least a fine AI or two - a whole cadre of them! :) And Seedling Stars has off-world adapted humans, specifically bred/created for the purpose of colonizing the other worlds. But *we* have to be careful with stem-cell research for treating paralysis or diabetes... Sigh. Regards, MB From aiguy at comcast.net Mon Jun 16 23:50:57 2008 From: aiguy at comcast.net (Gary Miller) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:50:57 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers In-Reply-To: <580930c20806161356xe82fa59x3f2220465e5a02cb@mail.gmail.com> References: <580930c20806110229p36d0067eh3413add4200c0611@mail.gmail.com><012e01c8cbc3$4a5a6b00$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677><580930c20806120226rb652c3u3c63807612fcc47@mail.gmail.com><01a401c8cca2$64984c50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677><580930c20806121015n4b4ea1e0u1ad0fa8454855ce1@mail.gmail.com><02c101c8cf28$a259ba50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677><580930c20806160644m7feb8476t15e0d83d55aae724@mail.gmail.com><7.0.1.0.2.20080616100045.023827e0@satx.rr.com> <580930c20806161356xe82fa59x3f2220465e5a02cb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Stefano Vaj said: >> Interestingly, however, the "meaning" of Dick's novels may be easily reversed in their cinematic versions. For instance, Do Androids Dream of Plastic Sheeps? is definitely anti-tech, but my grasp of Blade Runner is that replicants are the tragic heroes most of people are going to identify with... >> I think the story's title was "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" which wouldn't be nearly so funny if Spencer's Gifts didn't sell inflatable anatomically correct plastic sheep as gag gifts for bachelor parties. I didn't really sympathize with the replicants until the end when it appears that their leader at least, described his angst in exquisite detail and it was revealed that the girl our human hero had fallen in love with was next years model. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From thespike at satx.rr.com Tue Jun 17 00:37:23 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:37:23 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers In-Reply-To: References: <580930c20806110229p36d0067eh3413add4200c0611@mail.gmail.com> <012e01c8cbc3$4a5a6b00$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806120226rb652c3u3c63807612fcc47@mail.gmail.com> <01a401c8cca2$64984c50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806121015n4b4ea1e0u1ad0fa8454855ce1@mail.gmail.com> <02c101c8cf28$a259ba50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806160644m7feb8476t15e0d83d55aae724@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20080616100045.023827e0@satx.rr.com> <580930c20806161356xe82fa59x3f2220465e5a02cb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080616193520.02379c68@satx.rr.com> At 07:50 PM 6/16/2008 -0400, Gary wrote: >and it was revealed that the girl our human hero had fallen in love >with was next years model. If he was. In the book, it's clear that he's human; the director argues, however, that he, too, is a replicant with fake memories, doomed to die soon, and has dropped clues to this through the subsequent "director's cuts." Damien Broderick From spike66 at att.net Tue Jun 17 00:26:20 2008 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:26:20 -0700 Subject: [ExI] "Heavy Industry--1995" In-Reply-To: <20080616161311.HBYW25150.hrndva-omta01.mail.rr.com@D840DTB1.maxmore.com> Message-ID: <200806170053.m5H0r4KE018817@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Max More ... > > BTW, talking of SF, yesterday I finally made an exception to > my "no buying SF books" rule and bought Damien's Transcension. > > Max Transcension is a good one. It has a delightful Clarke-ishness but with a cool resolution. I gave up SF during my teen years, but that one made me consider taking it up once again. spike From brent.allsop at comcast.net Tue Jun 17 03:08:10 2008 From: brent.allsop at comcast.net (Brent Allsop) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:08:10 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Groups In-Reply-To: <4854F7BC.7060108@lineone.net> References: <4854F7BC.7060108@lineone.net> Message-ID: <48572A9A.3080207@comcast.net> ben wrote: > On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 10:15 PM, Anne Corwin > wrote: > > >>> The "join our camp!" thing is the sort of mentality that generally >>> > > > > causes me to run away screaming from groups of people > > Hey, me too! > > We should form a group! > > ben zaiboc > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > Transhumanists, I respect your diversity of belief like this, the more diversity the better, but I happen to feel differently. I think canonizer.com has nothing to do with group think as so many seem to be assuming. Group think is about one party or religion where if you disagree on any issue you are excommunicated or your 'vote is wasted'. We are about every individual indicating what they believe on each individual issue, resulting in everyone having a dynamic and unique 'signature' of everything they believe. Group think is about bottlenecked top down hierarchies while we seek after bottom up networks. Group think is about being in the traditional majority, we are about recognizing who are the leaders and finding quantitative rigorous ways to separate their signal from the group's noise. Group think is about "our theory is the one true one" while we seek to track and quantitatively measure all theories and their histories. Group think is "If you are not with us, you are against us" while we believe the more diversity the better. We want to know what everyone thinks, believes, and wants. Group think is about knowing what the guy at the top wants and seeking after only that, while we are seeking to know what everyone at the bottom wants and seeking after that. Group think is all about powerful governments and the top controlling the masses with invasive laws and powerful militaries and police forces. We are about quantitative and concise reputations and systems that allow the individual to utilize such to simply ignore any disreputable spam and scam. We are also frustrated at the terrible way progressive, should be leading people, tend to always live by "my way or the highway" and their tendency to always "run away screaming" from any kind of cooperative and social effort to help push societies still primitive herd based morals forward. Transhumanists, as proven by their repeated failures at any type of organization and cooperation, or ability to work together, are an extreme example of this. We are tired of all this, and how such leaves the masses to be controlled by the faithless fear and war mongering bastards at the top that think they know what is better for people at the bottom than they do. It's time for intelligent people to finally do the co-operative work required to develop systems that can enable us to recognize there is something way better than dieing and rotting everyone in the grave. Brent Allsop -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Tue Jun 17 09:42:37 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 11:42:37 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers In-Reply-To: References: <012e01c8cbc3$4a5a6b00$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806120226rb652c3u3c63807612fcc47@mail.gmail.com> <01a401c8cca2$64984c50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806121015n4b4ea1e0u1ad0fa8454855ce1@mail.gmail.com> <02c101c8cf28$a259ba50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> <580930c20806160644m7feb8476t15e0d83d55aae724@mail.gmail.com> <7.0.1.0.2.20080616100045.023827e0@satx.rr.com> <580930c20806161356xe82fa59x3f2220465e5a02cb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <580930c20806170242v6dcfae74v76743c5df9f63632@mail.gmail.com> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 1:50 AM, Gary Miller wrote: > > I think the story's title was "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" which > wouldn't be nearly so funny if Spencer's Gifts didn't sell inflatable > anatomically correct plastic sheep as gag gifts for bachelor parties. > Re-translating from Italian... :-) Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Tue Jun 17 09:58:57 2008 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 02:58:57 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] Economics of SENS Message-ID: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> A question entered my mind today: With rising medical costs and an ever increasing population of elderly forced to retire at age 65 just when they start needing the medical care the most, would the added productivity of SENS and the elimination of the medical costs associated with aging simply by preventing it not be more cost effective for individuals, insurance companies, and society as a whole in the long run? I don't have any numbers but I suspect that government/private investment in SENS could conceivably pay for itself in the span of several decades. I mean why let a productive tax-payer, consumer, or policy holder steadily become a burden on society by letting him get old when it is preventable? Any thoughts? This might be topic that Robin Hanson and Aubrey de Grey could address more effectively than I for obvious reasons. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "In ancient times they had no statistics so that they had to fall back on lies."- Stephen Leacock From aleksei at iki.fi Tue Jun 17 10:39:53 2008 From: aleksei at iki.fi (Aleksei Riikonen) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:39:53 +0300 Subject: [ExI] Economics of SENS In-Reply-To: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> References: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1db0b2da0806170339p5975e011v5db94365d5a41beb@mail.gmail.com> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 12:58 PM, The Avantguardian wrote: > A question entered my mind today: With rising medical costs and an ever > increasing population of elderly forced to retire at age 65 just when they > start needing the medical care the most, would the added productivity of SENS > and the elimination of the medical costs associated with aging simply by > preventing it not be more cost effective for individuals, insurance companies, > and society as a whole in the long run? I don't have any numbers but I suspect > that government/private investment in SENS could conceivably pay for itself in > the span of several decades. I mean why let a productive tax-payer, consumer, > or policy holder steadily become a burden on society by letting him get old > when it is preventable? Any thoughts? This might be topic that Robin Hanson and > Aubrey de Grey could address more effectively than I for obvious reasons. One thing to remember is that even if people don't get old, many/most will still want to retire once they have enough money in the bank. Anyway, I wouldn't think too much about the economics of a situation where the workforce consists of immortal humans. I doubt that will happen sooner, or last for long before we have AIs that do all jobs better than baseline-humans. -- Aleksei Riikonen - http://www.iki.fi/aleksei From xuenay at gmail.com Tue Jun 17 11:40:08 2008 From: xuenay at gmail.com (Kaj Sotala) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:40:08 +0300 Subject: [ExI] Economics of SENS In-Reply-To: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> References: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <6a13bb8f0806170440t332f1020l66c2fcf0fd0e4088@mail.gmail.com> On 6/17/08, The Avantguardian wrote: > start needing the medical care the most, would the added productivity of SENS > and the elimination of the medical costs associated with aging simply by > preventing it not be more cost effective for individuals, insurance companies, > and society as a whole in the long run? I don't have any numbers but I suspect Yes. Consider, for instance, "Longevity Dividend", the The Scientist article where four scientists argued for extra investment in (non-radical) life extension: http://www.grg.org/resources/TheScientist.htm . "According to studies undertaken at the International Longevity Center and at universities around the world, the extension of healthy life creates wealth for individuals and the nations in which they live. [7] Healthy older individuals accumulate more savings and investments than those beset by illness. They tend to remain productively engaged in society. They spark economic booms in so-called mature markets, including financial services, travel, hospitality, and intergenerational transfers to younger generations. Improved health status also leads to less absenteeism from school and work and is associated with better education and higher income." "What we have in mind is not the unrealistic pursuit of dramatic increases in life expectancy, let alone the kind of biological immortality best left to science fiction novels. [20] Rather, we envision a goal that is realistically achievable: a modest deceleration in the rate of aging sufficient to delay all aging-related diseases and disorders by about seven years." "The National Institutes of Health is funded at $28 billion in 2006, but less than 0.1% of that amount goes to understanding the biology of aging and how it predisposes us to a suite of costly diseases and disorders expressed at later ages. We are calling on Congress to invest 3 billion dollars annually to this effort; or about 1% of the current Medicare budget of $309 billion; and to provide the organizational and intellectual infrastructure and other related resources to make this work." In other words, the four who signed the petition thought that a mere 7-year extension of the human healthspan would produce savings large enough to justify an extra 3 billion in spending for a period of several years (no estimate was given about how long they thought this undertaking would require). Of course, we need to take into account the possibility that they were exaggarating the impact in order to get more money, as scientists often need to do, but even so, we can say that an outright elimination of old age would cause immense savings for society. This, of course, ignores the costs of the possible turmoil that's likely to ensue by the point that people realize that indefinite lifespans are possible - as Aleksei points out, many people are used to thinking that they'll retire at a certain age, and the thought of not getting a state-funded pension is likely to cause some disruption. However, I don't think all that many people would actually choose to retire: AFAIK, even most lottery winners who get millions tend to keep working anyway, and many of the wealthier individuals who could, given a few years, save enough money to live off interest nevertheless continue working. I tend to agree with Aleksei's point that we're likely to have very advanced AI by the time indefinite lifespans are possible, with a difficult-to-measure impact on economic estimates such as these, however. -- http://www.saunalahti.fi/~tspro1/ | http://xuenay.livejournal.com/ Organizations worth your time: http://www.singinst.org/ | http://www.crnano.org/ | http://www.mfoundation.org/ From aleksei at iki.fi Tue Jun 17 12:11:26 2008 From: aleksei at iki.fi (Aleksei Riikonen) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:11:26 +0300 Subject: [ExI] Economics of SENS In-Reply-To: <6a13bb8f0806170440t332f1020l66c2fcf0fd0e4088@mail.gmail.com> References: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> <6a13bb8f0806170440t332f1020l66c2fcf0fd0e4088@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <1db0b2da0806170511qeb4670bm3f4fa55ed6e5c06a@mail.gmail.com> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 2:40 PM, Kaj Sotala wrote: > However, I don't think all that many people would actually choose to > retire: AFAIK, even most lottery winners who get millions tend to keep > working anyway, and many of the wealthier individuals who could, given > a few years, save enough money to live off interest nevertheless > continue working. You're limiting yourself to thinking only about relatively wealthy people who have jobs that they like, even though they are a small minority of humans in the world as it currently exists. For most jobs that the economy currently relies on, one cannot find people who would do them if they had a bit more choice in the matter. On the other hand, I guess we *are* only talking about wealthy people when talking about (S)ENS. I mean, it makes no sense to provide ENS to someone who is still struggling with getting clean water and feeding their children. Before one gets around to offering ENS to them, one has presumably already dealt with their more pressing concerns, thereby making them wealthy in the sense of the word used here. So if we were in the position to offer ENS to everyone, we would anyway by some other means have transformed the economy so that there wouldn't be so many horrendous jobs as there currently are. (And I find it very unlikely that those horrendous jobs will be dropped before we have machines/AIs replacing the humans doing them, since dropping them earlier would hurt the economy and us rich folks, most of whom don't really care about the less fortunate.) > I tend to agree with Aleksei's point that we're likely to have very > advanced AI by the time indefinite lifespans are possible, with a > difficult-to-measure impact on economic estimates such as these, > however. What's difficult to measure about whether companies will choose to hire humans once there is higher quality labour available for a fraction of the cost? (If some legislation forces them to hire humans, it would just be an exceptionally stupid form of welfare -- a better arrangement for everyone would be for the economy to be more productive by using more productive workforce, thereby creating more wealth to be handed out to humans in less perverse ways than forcing companies to hire sub-par employees.) -- Aleksei Riikonen - http://www.iki.fi/aleksei From pharos at gmail.com Tue Jun 17 13:07:14 2008 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:07:14 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Economics of SENS In-Reply-To: <1db0b2da0806170511qeb4670bm3f4fa55ed6e5c06a@mail.gmail.com> References: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> <6a13bb8f0806170440t332f1020l66c2fcf0fd0e4088@mail.gmail.com> <1db0b2da0806170511qeb4670bm3f4fa55ed6e5c06a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 1:11 PM, Aleksei Riikonen wrote: > You're limiting yourself to thinking only about relatively wealthy > people who have jobs that they like, even though they are a small > minority of humans in the world as it currently exists. For most jobs > that the economy currently relies on, one cannot find people who would > do them if they had a bit more choice in the matter. > You don't need to speculate. Retirement has been much studied and society is changing. Of existing retirees, about one third have retirement jobs (at least part-time). But the baby boomer generation don't want to retire. 80% want a retirement job, though only about 7% want a full-time job. There are four main reasons the boomers want to keep working part-time in retirement. MONEY?The chance to earn supplemental income LOVE?Some people want retirement jobs because they just love to work. FRIENDS?Retirement jobs may provide a vibrant social life and a built-in network of professional colleagues and potential friends. FEAR?Some people have devoted themselves so completely to work before retirement that they prefer to keep working at retirement jobs as long as possible to delay any need to adjust to a different lifestyle. > On the other hand, I guess we *are* only talking about wealthy people > when talking about (S)ENS. I mean, it makes no sense to provide ENS to > someone who is still struggling with getting clean water and feeding > their children. Before one gets around to offering ENS to them, one > has presumably already dealt with their more pressing concerns, > thereby making them wealthy in the sense of the word used here. So if > we were in the position to offer ENS to everyone, we would anyway by > some other means have transformed the economy so that there wouldn't > be so many horrendous jobs as there currently are. (And I find it very > unlikely that those horrendous jobs will be dropped before we have > machines/AIs replacing the humans doing them, since dropping them > earlier would hurt the economy and us rich folks, most of whom don't > really care about the less fortunate.) > Machine/AIs to replace humans will be expensive. By the time they become cheap so much else will have changed in society that it doesn't even make much sense to talk about 'jobs' then. BillK From xuenay at gmail.com Tue Jun 17 13:16:53 2008 From: xuenay at gmail.com (Kaj Sotala) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:16:53 +0300 Subject: [ExI] Economics of SENS In-Reply-To: <1db0b2da0806170511qeb4670bm3f4fa55ed6e5c06a@mail.gmail.com> References: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> <6a13bb8f0806170440t332f1020l66c2fcf0fd0e4088@mail.gmail.com> <1db0b2da0806170511qeb4670bm3f4fa55ed6e5c06a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <6a13bb8f0806170616u6f105908y11bc868b2ede53b0@mail.gmail.com> On 6/17/08, Aleksei Riikonen wrote: > On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 2:40 PM, Kaj Sotala wrote: > > I tend to agree with Aleksei's point that we're likely to have very > > advanced AI by the time indefinite lifespans are possible, with a > > difficult-to-measure impact on economic estimates such as these, > > however. > > What's difficult to measure about whether companies will choose to > hire humans once there is higher quality labour available for a > fraction of the cost? It's difficult to measure if the AIs will rapidly come up with a cheap and easy method of uploading us all into superintelligences as well, or if a single AI will happen to take over the world, and if so, what kind of programming it has and whether its programming will lead it to implementing an entirely new sort of economy or maybe wiping out humanity altogether, etc. That sort of thing. -- http://www.saunalahti.fi/~tspro1/ | http://xuenay.livejournal.com/ Organizations worth your time: http://www.singinst.org/ | http://www.crnano.org/ | http://www.mfoundation.org/ From stathisp at gmail.com Tue Jun 17 13:50:53 2008 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:50:53 +1000 Subject: [ExI] Economics of SENS In-Reply-To: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> References: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: 2008/6/17 The Avantguardian : > A question entered my mind today: With rising medical costs and an ever > increasing population of elderly forced to retire at age 65 just when they > start needing the medical care the most, would the added productivity of SENS > and the elimination of the medical costs associated with aging simply by > preventing it not be more cost effective for individuals, insurance companies, > and society as a whole in the long run? I don't have any numbers but I suspect > that government/private investment in SENS could conceivably pay for itself in > the span of several decades. I mean why let a productive tax-payer, consumer, > or policy holder steadily become a burden on society by letting him get old > when it is preventable? Any thoughts? This might be topic that Robin Hanson and > Aubrey de Grey could address more effectively than I for obvious reasons. Is it plausible that the reason more money isn't spent on SENS is that people have neglected important positives in the cost-benefit analysis, rather than simply because they don't believe it is likely to work? -- Stathis Papaioannou From aleksei at iki.fi Tue Jun 17 13:59:50 2008 From: aleksei at iki.fi (Aleksei Riikonen) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:59:50 +0300 Subject: [ExI] Economics of SENS In-Reply-To: References: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> <6a13bb8f0806170440t332f1020l66c2fcf0fd0e4088@mail.gmail.com> <1db0b2da0806170511qeb4670bm3f4fa55ed6e5c06a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <1db0b2da0806170659gadd830dwdc8b5ea5ab1afc6b@mail.gmail.com> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 4:07 PM, BillK wrote: > On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 1:11 PM, Aleksei Riikonen wrote: >> You're limiting yourself to thinking only about relatively wealthy >> people who have jobs that they like, even though they are a small >> minority of humans in the world as it currently exists. For most jobs >> that the economy currently relies on, one cannot find people who would >> do them if they had a bit more choice in the matter. > > You don't need to speculate. Retirement has been much studied and > society is changing. What was I speculating about? Also, these studies you are referring to tend to tell only of the minority upper classes of our planetary society. My interest is not limited to them. A lot of people that the global economy currently relies on have probably not even heard of the concept of retirement. > Machine/AIs to replace humans will be expensive. > By the time they become cheap so much else will have changed in > society that it doesn't even make much sense to talk about 'jobs' > then. Once at least some AIs are able to do jobs such as computer programming and business analysis (in a wide sense of these job descriptions) well enough to be hired/"hired", I doubt there will be a longer than very short while where such AIs are expensive (unless nasty monopolies on key cognitive technologies persist unfortunately and surprisingly long). Yeah, we might not be using the word "job" much once we've gotten to such a point. But before we get to such a point, I expect most jobs that the global economy relies on to be rather unpleasant for humans to do, as is the situation currently. -- Aleksei Riikonen - http://www.iki.fi/aleksei From aleksei at iki.fi Tue Jun 17 14:18:38 2008 From: aleksei at iki.fi (Aleksei Riikonen) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:18:38 +0300 Subject: [ExI] Economics of SENS In-Reply-To: References: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1db0b2da0806170718g4adc97d2yb1408a778069af93@mail.gmail.com> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 4:50 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > Is it plausible that the reason more money isn't spent on SENS is that > people have neglected important positives in the cost-benefit > analysis, rather than simply because they don't believe it is likely > to work? Cost-benefit analyses have next to nothing to do with how humans usually make decisions. Such analyses are not usually done in the first place. When faced with an unusual suggestion, people don't start rationally considering attitudes that would clearly be considered weird and/or immoral in their social environment. Thinking doesn't enter into it, unless it is thinking about what their friends and associates would think of them. -- Aleksei Riikonen - http://www.iki.fi/aleksei From natasha at natasha.cc Tue Jun 17 14:25:02 2008 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:25:02 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Groups In-Reply-To: <48572A9A.3080207@comcast.net> References: <4854F7BC.7060108@lineone.net> <48572A9A.3080207@comcast.net> Message-ID: <00b401c8d085$ee48b7f0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> Brent Allsop wrote: We are also frustrated at the terrible way progressive, should be leading people, tend to always live by "my way or the highway" and their tendency to always "run away screaming" from any kind of cooperative and social effort to help push societies still primitive herd based morals forward. Transhumanists, as proven by their repeated failures at any type of organization and cooperation, or ability to work together, are an extreme example of this. We are tired of all this, and how such leaves the masses to be controlled by the faithless fear and war mongering bastards at the top that think they know what is better for people at the bottom than they do. It's time for intelligent people to finally do the co-operative work required to develop systems that can enable us to recognize there is something way better than dieing and rotting everyone in the grave. I don't agree entirely with you Brent. Transhumanist have worked very well in "groups" but unfortunately some of the "groups" have used group-think to position themselves against other H+ "groups". So it is not that H+ers cannot work together, it is that more attention is often placed on a group as being better than another group. Why is this? The most often culprits are religious, political or sex-oriented divisions. Tiresome, yes. Toward more co-operation , Natasha Natasha Vita-More BFA, MS, MPhil/PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Faculty of Technology, School of Computers, Communication and Electronics University of Plymouth, UK Arts and Design - NBIC+ Convergence H+ Europe -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Tue Jun 17 15:02:32 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:02:32 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Economics of SENS In-Reply-To: <1db0b2da0806170718g4adc97d2yb1408a778069af93@mail.gmail.com> References: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> <1db0b2da0806170718g4adc97d2yb1408a778069af93@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <580930c20806170802t6f395383ne07ad358ba19af2a@mail.gmail.com> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 4:18 PM, Aleksei Riikonen wrote: > On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 4:50 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: >> Is it plausible that the reason more money isn't spent on SENS is that >> people have neglected important positives in the cost-benefit >> analysis, rather than simply because they don't believe it is likely >> to work? > > Cost-benefit analyses have next to nothing to do with how humans > usually make decisions. Nowadays humans mostly make a decision on what the analysts would recommend regarding the company's shares next week, or - if they are politicians rather than managers - what the effects of its announcement will be on next poll... :-) The problem is not simply to have people with a vision. It is becoming whether it is actually possible and viable to pursue a radical vision, should you even have one, in contemporary society. Abstract or technical feasibility is not always the real hurdle, as most lawyers dealing with fundamental patents and breakthroughs know only too well... Stefano Vaj From thespike at satx.rr.com Tue Jun 17 18:07:11 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:07:11 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Economics of SENS Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080617130539.02578cc0@satx.rr.com> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 4:18 PM, Aleksei Riikonen wrote: > Stathis Papaioannou wrote: >> Is it plausible that the reason more money isn't spent on SENS is that >> people have neglected important positives in the cost-benefit >> analysis, rather than simply because they don't believe it is likely >> to work? > Cost-benefit analyses have next to nothing to do with how humans > usually make decisions. That's what Stathis just said. From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Wed Jun 18 04:23:30 2008 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:23:30 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] Economics of singularity In-Reply-To: <1db0b2da0806170339p5975e011v5db94365d5a41beb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <548962.21530.qm@web65414.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> --- Aleksei Riikonen wrote: > Anyway, I wouldn't think too much about the economics of a situation > where the workforce consists of immortal humans. I doubt that will > happen sooner, or last for long before we have AIs that do all jobs > better than baseline-humans. But if the AIs do the jobs better than base-line humans, they will be in higher demand. If the AIs are in higher demand, they will cost more than base-line humans. This will lead to a market where humans will still be able to do many jobs more cheaply than an AI. This is similar to why it is more economical in some situations to pay humans to wave signs around on street corners than to buy a mechanical or electric sign. This will in turn lead to a situation where you have relatively poor humans serving one another and relatively wealthy AIs serving one another and the increasingly rare wealthy humans until such wealthy humans get edged out in the competition. Then you will have two separate economies, one of AI and another of humans, each in bordering but non-overlapping ecological and market niches. Industrial centers in the desert versus farms in the tropics for example. By that point, niche-partitioning will have occured and a Nash Equilibrium between humans and AI will evolve. At least this is one of the more likely of the nine possible outcomes of the singularity that I have calculated. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "In ancient times they had no statistics so that they had to fall back on lies."- Stephen Leacock From kanzure at gmail.com Wed Jun 18 05:08:15 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:08:15 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Economics of singularity In-Reply-To: <548962.21530.qm@web65414.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> References: <548962.21530.qm@web65414.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <200806180008.15041.kanzure@gmail.com> On Tuesday 17 June 2008, The Avantguardian wrote: > But if the AIs do the jobs better than base-line humans, they will be > in higher demand. If the AIs are in higher demand, they will cost > more than base-line humans. This will lead to a market where humans > will still be able to do many No, AI in high demand is just software copying. Wrong economics. - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From jef at jefallbright.net Wed Jun 18 05:10:37 2008 From: jef at jefallbright.net (Jef Allbright) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:10:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Economics of singularity Message-ID: <485898d1.1f538c0a.245c.ffff936a@mx.google.com> Stuart wrote: > this is one of the more likely of the > nine possible outcomes of the > singularity that I have calculated. Please tell? From hkhenson at rogers.com Wed Jun 18 06:11:39 2008 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (hkhenson) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:11:39 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Groups In-Reply-To: <48572A9A.3080207@comcast.net> References: <4854F7BC.7060108@lineone.net> <48572A9A.3080207@comcast.net> Message-ID: <1213769665_15681@s5.cableone.net> At 08:08 PM 6/16/2008, Brent Allsop wrote: >Transhumanists, snip >Group think is all about powerful governments and the top >controlling the masses with invasive laws and powerful militaries >and police forces. We are about quantitative and concise >reputations and systems that allow the individual to utilize such to >simply ignore any disreputable spam and scam. As disconcerting as it is, I suspect on evolutionary psychology grounds that governments largely reflect the people they rule. >We are also frustrated at the terrible way progressive, should be >leading people, tend to always live by "my way or the highway" and >their tendency to always "run away screaming" from any kind of >cooperative and social effort to help push societies still primitive >herd based morals forward. Transhumanists, as proven by their >repeated failures at any type of organization and cooperation, or >ability to work together, are an extreme example of this. Largely correct, but they are not the only people with a historical record of failures. It's worth looking at the common characteristics of other such categories of people to see if there are common elements we can understand. It might also be good to look at people with similar characteristics who are effective in organization and cooperation. (If any can be identified.) >We are tired of all this, and how such leaves the masses to be >controlled by the faithless fear and war mongering bastards at the >top that think they know what is better for people at the bottom >than they do. It's time for intelligent people to finally do the >co-operative work required to develop systems that can enable us to >recognize there is something way better than dieing and rotting >everyone in the grave. Probably everyone here--or at least a substantial majority--agrees with you. Why are we so ineffective? For example, I think I know a way to get humanity out of the energy crisis, but the chances are not good that I will be able to interest enough people for the new concept to even be evaluated. It seems likely that there is a fundamental mismatch between people like us and the ability to get real world changes implemented. Keith From amara at amara.com Wed Jun 18 15:30:09 2008 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:30:09 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Spore Creature Creator released Message-ID: Hello Godlings and Game Fiends, Part of Spore is released now: the 'Spore Creature Creator' for Macs and PCs, in anticipation and preparation for the full Spore game release, later this year. I have a confession to make: one of the main reasons I chose my Master's degree: 'Computational Physics', in the late 1980s, was because I loved creating and being a master of my own universe. The physics was the physics that _I_ wanted to include. I didn't care if my simulations took 4 hours, the results showed my particles moving in the way that _I_ instructed them (Mwha Ha Ha!) to move in my own universe, and with always a few surprises. So then, Godlings unite! Spore Creature Creator http://www.macworld.com/article/134007/2008/06/sporecreature.html Q & A http://www.gamespot.com/news/6192630.html Will Wright's Spore Video http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330420559198 one caveat: Spore Creature Creator for the Mac OSX http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/06/17/spore-creature-creator-for-mac-os-x "Unfortunately, the demo only allows you to choose a few parts when creating your creatures. You need to pay $10 to get the fully functional game, which will be included as part of Spore when it is released later this year. You can still create creatures and share them with the central database now-a big part of game play in Spore-but creatures created on Windows PCs with the paid version of Creature Creator will be better. The web page states that you will be able to buy Creature Creator for the Mac soon, but I might just wait for the full game to be released. After all, waiting for platform equivalency is as much a part of Mac gaming as the playing." Amara (who always seems to have important deadlines when she wants to play with cool new technology) -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado From dharris234 at mindspring.com Wed Jun 18 23:28:06 2008 From: dharris234 at mindspring.com (David C. Harris) Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:28:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Californian boffins find Elixir of Eternal Youth In-Reply-To: <580930c20806161417j488a7fb6m2b79c3f2c320670a@mail.gmail.com> References: <580930c20806161417j488a7fb6m2b79c3f2c320670a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <48599A06.6010207@mindspring.com> The source of the article below is at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/16/californian_immortality_research/ . This seems to be further understanding of the process that was demonstrated by cross-connecting the blood vessels of various aged mice, which found that old mice receiving young factors healed more rapidly. The Research Channel web site has video on demand of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Holiday Lectures on aging (and related things) that describes the young-helps-old transfusion experiment. That lecture mentioned the Notch gene. Anyone know how to get the Nature article before it appears at my local library? Stefano Vaj wrote: > "Boffins" in inglese inglese vuol dire "scienziati"... > > > Californian boffins find Elixir of Eternal Youth > > > For mice only. Catherine Zeta Jones not involved > > By Lewis Page > > ? More by this author > > Published Monday 16th June 2008 09:56GMT > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > Mouse-molesting boffins in California have used biochemical signals to > rejuvenate elderly, knackered bodily tissues in a fashion normally > only achievable by youngsters. However, the scientists insist that > they have not yet achieved an immortality drug, and if they had it > would only be for mice. > > "We're not at a point where we're ready to inject ourselves with [this > stuff]" said Dr Morgan Carlson. > > Carlson's research was overseen by Irina Conboy, associate prof at UC > Berkeley. There doesn't seem to be any doubt that the two boffins are > in fact looking for an immortality drug: Conboy has described her > research > > as "Pathways to the Fountain of Youth". > > The long-sought elixir of eternal life may not yet be in our grasp, > but Conboy and Carlson have managed something promising enough to get > them published in /Nature/, perhaps the most prestigious boffinry journal. > > It seems that when we're young, the stem cells in our bodies > constantly repair and reinvigorate us. When we get old, this stops > happening and pretty soon people are going through your stuff. > > "We don't realize it, but as we grow our bodies are constantly being > remodeled," according to Conboy. "We are constantly falling apart, but > we don't notice it much when we're young because we're always being > restored. As we age, our stem cells are prevented, through chemical > signals, from doing their jobs." > > Apparently one can revitalise stem cells by putting them in the right > chemical environment. "When old tissue is placed in an environment of > young blood, the stem cells behave as if they are young again," > according to the Berkeley press release - in a process not unlike that > undergone by wrinkly old Hollywood stars placed in an environment of > Catherine Zeta Jones. > > Essentially, the Californian researchers were able to persuade muscle > tissues in some mice that they were young again. We didn't entirely > follow how they did it. > > "Interestingly, activated Notch competes with activated pSmad3 for > binding to the regulatory regions of the same CDK inhibitors in the > stem cell," said Professor Conboy. > > That certainly is interesting. > > "We found that Notch is capable of physically kicking off pSmad3 from > the promoters for the CDK inhibitors within the stem cell's nucleus, > which" - as any fool would realise - "tells us that a precise > manipulation of the balance of these pathways would allow the ability > to control stem cell responses." > > Diddling with Notch and pSmad3 levels using "an established method of > RNA interference" allowed Conboy and Carlson to manipulate TGF-beta > proteins and fire up the dormant stem cells of a group of elderly mice. > > The octogenarian murines "showed levels of cellular regeneration that > were comparable to their much younger peers", apparently. But people > shouldn't just start swigging down Notch, pSmad3 and TGF-beta at > random. Cellular regeneration, out of hand, is sometimes just another > name for cancer. > > Still, the Californian brainboxes seem cautiously optimistic. > > "When we are young, there is an optimal balance between Notch and > TGF-beta," according to Conboy. "We need to find out what the levels > of these chemicals are in the young so we can calibrate the system > when we're older. If we can do that, we could rejuvenate tissue repair > for a very long time." > > One thing's for sure - all this could have serious consequences for > the mighty Japanese robotics industry, currently tooling up to make > billions looking after the increasingly wrinkly populace of the Land > of the Rising Sun. The Berkeley elixir-of-youth researchers had best > watch their backs. > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -- David Harris, Palo Alto, California. GPS location: 37.41988, -122.13388 (1984 WGS system). Active account: dharris234 at mindspring.com Phone: 1-650-856-9126 (has answering machine or me) Lifetime e-mail forwarding account: David.C.Harris at stanfordalumni.org Postal ("snail mail") address: David Harris Medintrans 455 Margarita Ave. Palo Alto, CA 94306-2827 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From amara at amara.com Thu Jun 19 02:32:32 2008 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:32:32 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Programme Riz Khan: Guantanamo: The detainees Message-ID: In addition to recent news that established definitively that the drive to make torture an instrument of U.S. policy originated at the highest levels of the Bush administration (surprise, surprise), here, on this Riz Khan program, we learn that the 'dangerous' prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were mostly not (even remotely) engaging in terrorist activities to cause them to be picked up. Aljazeera : PROGRAMME RIZ KHAN Guantanamo: The detainees http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvVdOrbRmNE Part One http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8qiygAWLSU Part Two Summary from http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/059EA4E1-1C50-46F5-92F0-0E92880CFF0C.htm "The worst of the worst." That is how the Bush administration described the more than 770 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. But a closer look at those released from the detention facility shows anything but. Many, like the Uighur detainees from China, were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. Others were 'turned in' because they fell victim to familial or tribal grudges. In fact, the value of the information provided by detainees at Guantanamo was of very limited value, so much so, that former Pentagon officials described it as "worthless" and "useless". So who are the detainees of Guantanamo Bay and why were they held for so long if they had no real information? On Tuesday's Riz Khan we talk to Roy Gutman and Matt Schofield of McClatchy News Service about the lives of those captured, held and released from Guantanamo. The stories of 66 former detainees in 11 countries are the subject of McClatchy's just released Guantanamo: Beyond the Law. -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Jun 19 08:36:31 2008 From: sjatkins at mac.com (samantha) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:36:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] self-improving AI In-Reply-To: <51ce64f10806161349k199501a1pfc1be096663bb88@mail.gmail.com> References: <51ce64f10806161349k199501a1pfc1be096663bb88@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <485A1A8F.4020206@mac.com> Michael Anissimov wrote: > On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 11:13 AM, Stefano Vaj > wrote: > > > So, are you suggesting that we should drop human enhancement efforts > altogether, and, as our successor, concentrate exclusively on the > development of a self-improving AI? > > > I see self-improving AI as potentially the easiest path to make > radical (and safe) human enhancement available to everyone. You've > been a transhumanist for a while -- is this idea new? > Self improving is definitely needed. Many of us are less certain as to whether an autonomous AI approach is better than (more likely to lead to a happy outcome for us) than increasingly enhanced self-improving humans. I have nothing against autonomous AIs of course but I strongly hope that we cyborgs incorporate AI technologies, rebuld or build new bodies and upload. I hesitate to count on the goodness/interest of radically self-improving autonomous AIs alone to give it all to us. - samantha From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Jun 19 08:42:07 2008 From: sjatkins at mac.com (samantha) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:42:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Economics of SENS In-Reply-To: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> References: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <485A1BDF.5080500@mac.com> The Avantguardian wrote: > A question entered my mind today: With rising medical costs and an ever > increasing population of elderly forced to retire at age 65 just when they > start needing the medical care the most, would the added productivity of SENS > and the elimination of the medical costs associated with aging simply by > preventing it not be more cost effective for individuals, insurance companies, > and society as a whole in the long run? I don't have any numbers but I suspect > that government/private investment in SENS could conceivably pay for itself in > the span of several decades. I have been saying this for a while. SENS may be the only viable way of keeping the economy from melting the rest of the way down. The costs of all the boomers hitting the promised governmental committments at once is not survivable short of some major techno-economic miracle. Of course they might choose to default on all those unrealistic promises and just let all of us die. - samantha From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Jun 19 08:45:11 2008 From: sjatkins at mac.com (samantha) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:45:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Economics of SENS In-Reply-To: <1db0b2da0806170339p5975e011v5db94365d5a41beb@mail.gmail.com> References: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> <1db0b2da0806170339p5975e011v5db94365d5a41beb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <485A1C97.5010501@mac.com> Aleksei Riikonen wrote: > On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 12:58 PM, The Avantguardian > wrote: > >> A question entered my mind today: With rising medical costs and an ever >> increasing population of elderly forced to retire at age 65 just when they >> start needing the medical care the most, would the added productivity of SENS >> and the elimination of the medical costs associated with aging simply by >> preventing it not be more cost effective for individuals, insurance companies, >> and society as a whole in the long run? I don't have any numbers but I suspect >> that government/private investment in SENS could conceivably pay for itself in >> the span of several decades. I mean why let a productive tax-payer, consumer, >> or policy holder steadily become a burden on society by letting him get old >> when it is preventable? Any thoughts? This might be topic that Robin Hanson and >> Aubrey de Grey could address more effectively than I for obvious reasons. >> > > One thing to remember is that even if people don't get old, many/most > will still want to retire once they have enough money in the bank. > Retiring as an option or in order to work on things of your own desire with enough in the bank is vastly different than retiring because you are too decrepit and having not nearly enough to not need the government programs. > Anyway, I wouldn't think too much about the economics of a situation > where the workforce consists of immortal humans. I doubt that will > happen sooner, or last for long before we have AIs that do all jobs > better than baseline-humans. > > Not even necessarily immortal at first but simply able and willing to continue work. In the short term we are running out of skilled people as the boomers start retiring in many areas. - s From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Jun 19 08:49:03 2008 From: sjatkins at mac.com (samantha) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:49:03 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Economics of SENS In-Reply-To: <1db0b2da0806170511qeb4670bm3f4fa55ed6e5c06a@mail.gmail.com> References: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> <6a13bb8f0806170440t332f1020l66c2fcf0fd0e4088@mail.gmail.com> <1db0b2da0806170511qeb4670bm3f4fa55ed6e5c06a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <485A1D7F.8060302@mac.com> Aleksei Riikonen wrote: > On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 2:40 PM, Kaj Sotala wrote: > >> However, I don't think all that many people would actually choose to >> retire: AFAIK, even most lottery winners who get millions tend to keep >> working anyway, and many of the wealthier individuals who could, given >> a few years, save enough money to live off interest nevertheless >> continue working. >> > > You're limiting yourself to thinking only about relatively wealthy > people who have jobs that they like, even though they are a small > minority of humans in the world as it currently exists. For most jobs > that the economy currently relies on, one cannot find people who would > do them if they had a bit more choice in the matter. > Why the classist slant? There are people all over the economic spectrum that like what they do for a living. > On the other hand, I guess we *are* only talking about wealthy people > when talking about (S)ENS. Says who? It depends radically on the technology employed and the scaling what the cost will be. > I mean, it makes no sense to provide ENS to > someone who is still struggling with getting clean water and feeding > their children. Orthogonal issue. Keep the people health who are likely to solve the root of these problems if you want a solution that is global quickly. - samantha From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Jun 19 08:51:49 2008 From: sjatkins at mac.com (samantha) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:51:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Economics of SENS In-Reply-To: References: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <485A1E25.70701@mac.com> Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > Is it plausible that the reason more money isn't spent on SENS is that > people have neglected important positives in the cost-benefit > analysis, rather than simply because they don't believe it is likely > to work? > > > In part. The biggest obstacle in my opinion is that we (almost all humans) have become very, very good at making a virtue of or deeply accepting that which until recently no one much thought we could do anything about. That goes really deep. - samantha From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Jun 19 09:00:56 2008 From: sjatkins at mac.com (samantha) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:00:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Economics of singularity In-Reply-To: <548962.21530.qm@web65414.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> References: <548962.21530.qm@web65414.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <485A2048.5020600@mac.com> The Avantguardian wrote: > --- Aleksei Riikonen wrote: > >> Anyway, I wouldn't think too much about the economics of a situation >> where the workforce consists of immortal humans. I doubt that will >> happen sooner, or last for long before we have AIs that do all jobs >> better than baseline-humans. >> > > But if the AIs do the jobs better than base-line humans, they will be in higher > demand. If the AIs are in higher demand, they will cost more than base-line > humans. Hmm. Are you making some assumptions about the supply of such AIs? Once I produce my first competent AI programmer it is conceivable I can crank out as many as desired needed for about as much effort as burning another copy of some software today. The cost will drop to nearly nothing more than the electricity to run the machines. This for a tireless 24-7 worker. There is no way any human is going to compete on quality and amount of work or cost in that scenario. Game over. > This will lead to a market where humans will still be able to do many > jobs more cheaply than an AI. This is similar to why it is more economical in > some situations to pay humans to wave signs around on street corners than to > buy a mechanical or electric sign. That is already silly and only works because it is silly. :-) > This will in turn lead to a situation where > you have relatively poor humans serving one another and relatively wealthy AIs > serving one another and the increasingly rare wealthy humans until such wealthy > humans get edged out in the competition. So you need to upgrade humans very quickly to keep up and/or produce a society of such abundance that most don't care much whether something they produce is unique enough, good enough, desired enough to support them monetarily. When nano-Santa produces everything you want in your kitchen how much do you care about "making a living" by earning a paycheck? - samantha From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Jun 19 09:18:47 2008 From: sjatkins at mac.com (samantha) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:18:47 -0700 Subject: [ExI] "Heavy Industry--1995" In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20080616063307.024c35d0@satx.rr.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20080615185847.0232a3f0@satx.rr.com> <1360.12.77.169.68.1213612173.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <7.0.1.0.2.20080616063307.024c35d0@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <485A2477.7050708@mac.com> Damien Broderick wrote: > At 06:29 AM 6/16/2008 -0400, MB wrote: > > >> And I look at my ancient SF books and wonder what happened. >> >> James White: Second Ending >> James Blish: The Seedling Stars >> >> We've lost our way? >> > > Well, those books are set considerably in the future, no? And even > for "near futures" there can be setbacks of a few decades. Speaking for myself, I lost my way or never fully found and claimed it. Somehow I didn't put it together that if I expected these wondrous things to happen that I, I personally, needed to arrange my life to do what I can to make it so. Instead I cheered from the sidelines, talked about the fascinating ideas over and over and over again but spent most of my time for the 8 or 9 years since I came around these parts working relatively mundane jobs for most of my productive time to "make a living" with no clear plan or energy about living more as needed to help bring the future as I want it into being. I suspect I am not alone. Maybe "in another life"? What are we (many of us) waiting for? - samantha From sjatkins at mac.com Thu Jun 19 09:20:27 2008 From: sjatkins at mac.com (samantha) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:20:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] "Heavy Industry--1995" In-Reply-To: <200806160921.22007.kanzure@gmail.com> References: <7.0.1.0.2.20080615185847.0232a3f0@satx.rr.com> <1360.12.77.169.68.1213612173.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> <580930c20806160703j7e657d94qe64bc35f1e6d6f11@mail.gmail.com> <200806160921.22007.kanzure@gmail.com> Message-ID: <485A24DB.1020906@mac.com> Bryan Bishop wrote: > On Monday 16 June 2008, Stefano Vaj wrote: > >> This is a discomforting thought, but at least it calls for a higher >> degree of commitment from individuals and governments, and represents >> one better reason for the existence of transhumanism as such than the >> idea of having a tea club of cheeleaders applauding from the aisles >> "inevitable" developments, if not even considering the idea of >> delaying them... >> > > Woah, what? Is that what you think transhumans are? Cheerleaders? > > There are wonderful exceptions but the majority who call ourselves transhumans or transhumanist are very aptly described as "cheerleaders". From pharos at gmail.com Thu Jun 19 09:33:21 2008 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:33:21 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Californian boffins find Elixir of Eternal Youth In-Reply-To: <48599A06.6010207@mindspring.com> References: <580930c20806161417j488a7fb6m2b79c3f2c320670a@mail.gmail.com> <48599A06.6010207@mindspring.com> Message-ID: 2008/6/18 David C. Harris wrote: > The source of the article below is at > http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/16/californian_immortality_research/ . > > This seems to be further understanding of the process that was demonstrated > by cross-connecting the blood vessels of various aged mice, which found that > old mice receiving young factors healed more rapidly. The Research Channel > web site has video on demand of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Holiday > Lectures on aging (and related things) that describes the young-helps-old > transfusion experiment. That lecture mentioned the Notch gene. > > Anyone know how to get the Nature article before it appears at my local > library? If you have a Nature subscription, you can read it here: If you don't, perhaps some kind subscriber could send you a copy privately? (I'm not a subscriber). BillK From dharris234 at mindspring.com Thu Jun 19 10:06:50 2008 From: dharris234 at mindspring.com (David C. Harris) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 03:06:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Californian boffins find Elixir of Eternal Youth In-Reply-To: References: <580930c20806161417j488a7fb6m2b79c3f2c320670a@mail.gmail.com> <48599A06.6010207@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <485A2FBA.5070502@mindspring.com> BillK wrote: > If you have a Nature subscription, you can read it here: > > > If you don't, perhaps some kind subscriber could send you a copy privately? > (I'm not a subscriber). > > Yeah, I could live with that! It never crossed my mind.... ;-) From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Thu Jun 19 10:28:06 2008 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 03:28:06 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] Economics of singularity In-Reply-To: <485898d1.1f538c0a.245c.ffff936a@mx.google.com> Message-ID: <345005.80008.qm@web65404.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> --- Jef Allbright wrote: > > Stuart wrote: > > this is one of the more likely of the > > nine possible outcomes of the > > singularity that I have calculated. > > Please tell? Well Jef this is still a work in progress but since you asked so nicely, here you go. Feedback would be appreciated: My discovery of the nine possible outcomes of the singularity grew out of my attempts to unite Neo-Darwinian ecology and economics into a single discipline by way of game theory. Biologists have noted for some time that the game Prisoner?s Dilemma (PD) models some relationships between organisms very well but doesn?t quite fit others. While ecologists have long been able to categorize most relationships between organisms (individuals or species, it doesn?t matter) into a set of distinct species interactions. The canonical species interactions are: Predation/parasitism, commensalism, neutralism, amensalism, mutualism, and competition. These relationships form the basis of a new game I developed in response to the shortcomings of PD. I call my game ?Critter?s Dilemma? and it is essentially PD with an additional possible move and additional associated payoffs for that move. What I have done is apply game theory to the ecological model of relationships. In order to generate a payoff matrix to analyze the game, one has to introduce the concept of symmetry. Three of the relationships- mutualism, neutralism, and competition are symmetric for both players. While the remaining three relationships- commensalism, amensalism, and predation are asymmetric. Because of this asymmetry, each of these represents two possible relationships. In predation for example, organism A can eat organism B or conversely organism B can eat organism A. Three symmetric relationships and six asymmetric relationships total nine possible relationships. Using the dynamics of these relationships, you can model the evolution of relationships between any two entities. This should be true for single cells, people, insects, flowers, corporations, countries, Jupiter brains, or intergalactic empires. Thus for any two entities, there are only nine possible ecological/economic relationships and those relationships are outcomes determined by the strategy employed by those two entities playing Critter?s Dilemma against one another, usually unaware that they are doing so. Since neither humans nor AI are exempt from evolutionary and market forces, there are nine possible outcomes for the singularity. Keep in mind these are generalized outcomes and each can have numerous possible manifestations and variations. Futhermore except for the Nash equilibrium states, they are not stable and depending on the shifting strategies employed by the players, each can transform into one of the others at any time. Critter?s Dilemma: Player B C I D ------------------- C | R,R | i,R | S,T | ------------------- Player A I | R,i | i,i | S,i | ------------------- D | T,S | i,S | P,P | ------------------- Moves: C=Cooperate, I=Ignore, D=Defect Keep in mind that these moves represent the subjective effect of one player on the other with respect to cost or benefit so they do not necessarily correspond to the common definition of the word or even to the intention of player making the move. For example, when a mosquito bites you and sucks your blood, you have effectively cooperated with it even if you tried to swat it and failed because from the mosquito?s point of view he got a meal. Similarly, you may be aware of another creature?s existence but if you neither benefit it nor harm it (whether you are able to or not), you are ignoring it, even if it is stepping on you while tending its garden. Furthermore in the context of two entities playing Critter's Dilemma for real, the strategies available to a given player may be limited by such considerations as size or relative power level. In other words, mice are seldom in a position to retaliate against cats. Payoffs: (T)emptation to defect > (R)eward for cooperation > (i)nsignificant cost or benefit of being ignored > (P)unishment for mutual defection > (S)ucker?s payoff 1. Competition (D,D)->(P,P) *strong Nash equilibrium 2. Neutralism (I,I)->(i,i) *weak Nash equilibrium 3. Mutualism (C,C)->(R,R) *Pareto-optimal strategy pair 4. Predation A on B (D,C)->(T,S) 5. Predation B on A (C,D)->(S,T) 6. Commensalism pro-A (I,C)->(R,i) 7. Commensalism pro-B (C,I)->(i,R) 8. Amensalism anti-A (I,D)->(S,i) 9. Amensalism anti-B (D,I)->(i,S) 1. Competition: This relationship corresponds to strategy pair (D,D) and payoff (P,P) and is a strong Nash equilibrium meaning that assuming that their opponent?s strategy remains consistent , no change in strategy by either player will result in an outcome better than or even equal to the current outcome. This relationship seems fairly self explanatory though it actually covers a great variety of mutually detrimental relationships common in nature and economics. This relationship can refer to everything from playful verbal jousting over the affections of pretty girl at a cocktail party, to a price war between companies, to the horrors of an all out genocidal war between man and machine. Competition can be modified by the biological phenomenon of spite. Competition with enough spite attached could have a modified payoff of (S,S) which is essentially the complete mutual destruction of both entities. Interspecies competition is normally somewhat rare in nature because most ecosystems have already settled into an outcome where one species dominates a given ecological niche in a region having already forced out any potential competing species. However it is often observed when foreign species are introduced into a new area and fight the indigenous species for its niche. Intraspecies competition on the other hand is exceedingly common and is a general rule in biology since members of the same species have identical resource requirements and are thus prone to squabble over niches. Fortunately intraspecies competition often exhibits less spite than interspecies competition. Thus seldom will jousting bighorn rams fight to the death over a ewe for example. In regards to the singularity, this outcome seems to be the one that science fiction writers and Hollywood script writers seem fixated on as evidenced by the Terminator, Berserker Wars, etc. Although it is but one of nine possible outcomes, because it does represent a strong Nash equilibrium in Critter?s Dilemma, it is actually quite probable if we do not try to avoid it by carefully planning the resource requirements of the AI machines to not overlap too much with ours. 2. Neutralism: This relation corresponds to the strategy pair (I,I) and payoff (i,i) in Critter?s Dilemma. Like butterflies and buffalo, organisms in a neutral relationship live past one another. Applied to the singularity, it would mean that humanity and the sentient machines of the future follow their bliss and ignore one another without any real cost or benefit to either. We may occupy completely different territories and seldomly interact with one another or the very same territory with the AIs utilizing a completely different pattern of resource use from us to forestall any competition. This outcome is in game-theoretical terms a weak Nash equilibrium in the Critter?s Dilemma game meaning that assuming their opponent?s strategy remains stable, neither entity can improve its outcome by changing its strategy. A weak Nash equilibrium differs from a strong one in that it may be possible to achieve an equal payoff by changing ones strategy but certainly not a better one. Neutralism is probably one of the most common relationships in nature and is relatively stable. Since if you can?t eat it and it can?t eat you, then you are probably better off leaving it be. Most strangers one encounters daily and subsequently ignore would fall into this category as would two businesses in different market sectors. 3. Mutualism: This relationship corresponds to the strategy pair (C,C) and payoff (R,R). Mutualism is sometimes called symbiosis but that is a mistake. Symbiosis is a more general term regarding the methods by which organisms of differing species live together and some forms of symbiosis are downright nasty. Both entities benefit from the relationship of mutualism and may grow dependent on one another. Examples from nature include pollinating insects and flowering plants. An extreme example is the yucca cactus and the yucca moth. The cactus is the only food that the yucca caterpillar can eat and the adult moth is the only insect that can pollinate the cactus flowers. Mitochondria and the cells they inhabit would also fall into this category. Economic examples would be the hardware and software industries, marriages and civil unions, or two businesses in a contractual agreement. In game theory terms, this outcome is Pareto-optimal meaning that there is no different strategy that will make either player better off without hurting the other player. It is also the outcome with highest total payoff over both players. Applied to the singularity, Iain Bank?s ?The Culture? would fit into this outcome as would Data from ?Star Trek:TNG?. This outcome with the AI would certainly be the best for both of our species as well as the most civilized. Possible ways this sort of relationship might be engineered into the AI would be to require human intervention in some step of the AI?s life cycle, replication, or reproductive process. A power switch built into every AI that requires a living human hand to operate might be one possible example of this. In any case in order to achieve this sort of relationship with AI, we will need to make ourselves essential to the AI somehow. Care must be taken however since mutualism is not a Nash equilibrium. Thus mutualism will not necessarily be stable since the temptation to defect will always be present. Indeed even amongst yucca moths there are documented cheater variants that lay their eggs in the cactus without pollinating it. 4. Predation (Human on AI): This relationship corresponds to strategy pair (D,C) and payoff (T,S). Although quite nicely modeling actual predatory relationships in nature, I use the term more generally to mean any asymmetric transfer of resources sufficient to give relatively large gains to one player at the cost of the other. This cost can be relatively small to the prey?s total resources, but not negligible, like a mosquito?s blood meal or as large as the very existence of the prey species or entity. I use the term predation loosely to cover a whole gamut of exploitive behaviors ranging from the literal hunting and eating of the other player to parasitically sucking its blood. Economically this relationship manifests itself in such phenomena as theft, slavery, taxation without representation, and even the mooch that always borrows money and never pays it back. In terms of the singularity, this outcome would mean that the humans benefit at the expense of the AI. An example of this would be slavery of the intelligent machines or the cannibalization of the AI for spare parts for our ?dumb? machines. In any case what matters is the asymmetric flow of resources. Care must be taken with this particular strategy as it invites retaliation from intelligent prey. Even with non-intelligent prey, there is a non-negligible risk associated with predation as many an unlucky lion has been kicked by a zebra or gored by a wildebeest. 5. Predation (AI on human) This corresponds to strategy pair (C,D) and payoff (S,T). This is like number 4 only machines benefit at humanity?s expense. The Matrix with its machines using humans for energy would be an unlikely example of this. Another example would be the AI?s harvesting humans for our carbon atoms. Obviously variations of this possible outcome can be rather scary. But less horrific variations are possible too such as an AI that hides in the Internet and steals money from people?s bank accounts or rogue robots recharging themselves from people?s electrical outlets when they aren?t looking. This outcome, though less likely, than the Nash equilibrium outcomes, should still be a matter for concern. 6. Pro-human Commensalism This outcome corresponds to strategy pair (I,C) and payoff (R,i). Commensalism is a form of symbiotic relationship wherein one species is benefited by another but neither harms nor benefits that species. Examples from nature include the microscopic dust mites that are on everybody. They roam our bodies, even the cleanest of us, and eat flakes of our dead skin as it sloughs off. We in essence cooperate with them in that we give (albeit unwillingly and usually unknowingly) them shelter and food. They give us nothing in return but they don?t hurt us either (except an unlucky few that are allergic to their feces), so they in essence ignore us. Thus they are in a commensal relationship with us. An example of an economic commensal relationship would be kids on skateboards using a corporation?s parking structure to skate in on a weekend or a bank using your money to make money for itself without taking any of it. Possible examples of this outcome post-singularity would be large AI city complexes that humans squatted in perhaps scavenging technology whilst beneath the notice of the AI. Or the friendly AI overlord that devoted a few cycles to our survival simply because it cost the AI so little or was a side effect of it pursuing its bliss. In any of these scenarios care must be taken not to incur non-negligible costs upon the AI or the AI might interpret such as a defection and retaliate. Similar to someone with a dust mite allergy using medicated soap to kill the dust mites. Nanosanta and abundance scenarios might also fall into this category as well although they could also fit under mutualism. 7. Pro-AI Commensalism This outcome corresponds to strategy pair (C,I) and payoff (i,R). This outcome is the inverse of outcome 6. In this outcome the AI neither harm us nor benefit us yet are benefited by us. Perhaps we plug them in and they just ignore us and withdraw into an inner reality to contemplate their existence. Or perhaps they escape into the Internet and download onto people?s hard drives to hide when people leave their PCs unattended. Although less dangerous for us than some of the other outcomes, there would still be a risk of the AI shifting its strategy to defect. 8. Anti-human Amensalism This outcome corresponds to strategy pair (I,D) and payoff (S,i). Amensalism is a symbiotic relationship that is somewhat rare in nature but not so much in human affairs. Examples in nature include black walnut trees releasing toxins from their roots that kill off surrounding shrubs and grasses, giant sequoias killing off pine saplings in their shadow, and fungi secreting antibiotics that kill other microorganisms. Amensal players thus incur a cost to the other player whilst deriving no direct benefit by doing so. Species extinction caused by mankind due to pollution or habitat destruction would qualify as would accidentally or purposefully stepping on a harmless insect. You didn?t benefit from killing it, you might not be aware that you killed it, but nonetheless it?s dead, Jim. In post-singularity scenarios, this outcome could take a variety of forms. We could, for example, simply be irrelevant to the machines. They might follow their bliss and tile us over with paperclips. Or perhaps they decide to power themselves with unshielded nuclear reactors and their very presence is toxic to us. In any case this is not a desirable outcome and the proper strategic response would be retaliation if possible which would lead to interspecies competition. 9. Anti-AI Amensalism This outcome corresponds to strategy pair (D,I) and payoff (i,S). In this scenario, humanity harms the AI while deriving no real cost or benefit from doing so. Examples of this might include humans shutting down an AI that hasn?t done anything to deserve it or taking outdated AI offline. While not directly dangerous to us, this strategy does carry significant risk of retaliation and could lead to the Nash equilibrium of interspecies competition if the AI shifts its strategy in response to our actions. Stuart LaForge alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu "In ancient times they had no statistics so that they had to fall back on lies."- Stephen Leacock From aiguy at comcast.net Thu Jun 19 12:10:37 2008 From: aiguy at comcast.net (Gary Miller) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 08:10:37 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Programme Riz Khan: Guantanamo: The detainees In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <076BB420CEF7473F962A97B219D956C2@ZANDRA2> Amara Graps quoted: Summary from http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/059EA4E1-1C50-46F5-92F0-0E92880CFF0C. htm "The worst of the worst." That is how the Bush administration described the more than 770 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. But a closer look at those released from the detention facility shows anything but. Many, like the Uighur detainees from China, were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. Others were 'turned in' because they fell victim to familial or tribal grudges. In fact, the value of the information provided by detainees at Guantanamo was of very limited value, so much so, that former Pentagon officials described it as "worthless" and "useless". So who are the detainees of Guantanamo Bay and why were they held for so long if they had no real information? On Tuesday's Riz Khan we talk to Roy Gutman and Matt Schofield of McClatchy News Service about the lives of those captured, held and released from Guantanamo. The stories of 66 former detainees in 11 countries are the subject of McClatchy's just released Guantanamo: Beyond the Law. My Response: Then why since we're only releasing the detainees like Al-Ajmi from Guantanamo who we feel are least likely to rejoin the terrorists did he blow himself on May 8th in a suicide bombing in Iraq. The same article confirms that other releasees from Guantanamo have been subsequently killed in combat and suicide bombings. http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/08/africa/gitmo.php http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/05/07/gitmo.bomber/ http://www.timeswatch.org/articles/2008/20080508125900.aspx http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/08/guantanamo.usa With every inmate we release from Guantanamo we risk future deaths of US Forces and innocent civilians. From benboc at lineone.net Thu Jun 19 12:53:50 2008 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:53:50 +0100 Subject: [ExI] John Horgan and George Johnson on singularity In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <485A56DE.7070006@lineone.net> Damien Broderick wrote: >Two notable science writers tell each other why it's all "just >science fiction": > > > >(Why is this regarded as a *criticism,* I often wonder? It's like >saying, "Oh, television, microwaved meals, rockets to the Moon, >atomic energy and weapons, life on other worlds--that's all just >science fiction.") Wait. You can't lump life on other worlds and the singularity in with microwaved meals and atomic energy. Well, you can if you want to, but it doesn't make much sense. Some of those things actually do exist, and some of them haven't yet been demonstrated to exist. I'm not saying I agree with the idea that this is valid criticism, obviously it's not, but neither is it like saying "TV and life on other worlds - that's just science fiction". ben zaiboc From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Jun 19 13:10:21 2008 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:10:21 +1000 Subject: [ExI] Programme Riz Khan: Guantanamo: The detainees In-Reply-To: <076BB420CEF7473F962A97B219D956C2@ZANDRA2> References: <076BB420CEF7473F962A97B219D956C2@ZANDRA2> Message-ID: 2008/6/19 Gary Miller : > Then why since we're only releasing the detainees like Al-Ajmi from > Guantanamo who we feel are least likely to rejoin the terrorists did he blow > himself on May 8th in a suicide bombing in Iraq. > > The same article confirms that other releasees from Guantanamo have been > subsequently killed in combat and suicide bombings. Could it be that people not murderously disposed towards the US to begin with change as a result of their incarceration? -- Stathis Papaioannou From benboc at lineone.net Thu Jun 19 12:54:51 2008 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:54:51 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <485A571B.5030704@lineone.net> The very last paragraph of "Century Rain" by Alastair Reynolds took me so much by surprise my mouth was hanging open like a fish's. I've never read any Conrad, but i imagine the experience was much the same. ben zaiboc From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Jun 19 13:18:53 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:18:53 +0200 Subject: [ExI] self-improving AI In-Reply-To: <485A1A8F.4020206@mac.com> References: <51ce64f10806161349k199501a1pfc1be096663bb88@mail.gmail.com> <485A1A8F.4020206@mac.com> Message-ID: <580930c20806190618h64ae5c10kb116a6b82aa1eb41@mail.gmail.com> On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 10:36 AM, samantha wrote: > I hesitate to count on the > goodness/interest of radically self-improving autonomous AIs alone to > give it all to us. Or even to give it all to themselves as our "mind successors"... Stefano Vaj From stathisp at gmail.com Thu Jun 19 13:20:49 2008 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:20:49 +1000 Subject: [ExI] Economics of SENS In-Reply-To: <485A1E25.70701@mac.com> References: <974209.26074.qm@web65408.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> <485A1E25.70701@mac.com> Message-ID: 2008/6/19 samantha : > In part. The biggest obstacle in my opinion is that we (almost all > humans) have become very, very good at making a virtue of or deeply > accepting that which until recently no one much thought we could do > anything about. That goes really deep. Yes, I think this is far more significant than people not supporting anti-ageing research because they think growing old and dying is a good thing. In fact, I suspect that those who make such outrageous claims do so mainly to console themselves in the face of what they consider inevitable. -- Stathis Papaioannou From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Jun 19 14:35:23 2008 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:35:23 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Programme Riz Khan: Guantanamo: The detainees In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <580930c20806190735t6a57e23elf019ed7a8700db36@mail.gmail.com> On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 4:32 AM, Amara Graps wrote: > So who are the detainees of Guantanamo Bay and why were they held for so > long if they had no real information? As some kind of escape goats, or rather sacrificial lambs? :-) Stefano Vaj From amara at amara.com Thu Jun 19 15:29:19 2008 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:29:19 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Programme Riz Khan: Guantanamo: The detainees Message-ID: Gary Miller aiguy at comcast.net : >Then why since we're only releasing the detainees like Al-Ajmi from >Guantanamo who we feel are least likely to rejoin the terrorists did he blow >himself on May 8th in a suicide bombing in Iraq. (Did you view the program?) Since he spent three years there, that was three years of heavy interrogation (read: torture), released because he was found to be 'worthless' for information, given no compensation, no apology. Some number of those ~500 released detainees could not go back to their families and former lives because of the shame (and shock) of what happened. Is anyone surprised that such an experience would transform someone into a suicide bomber against the U.S.? The relevant question to ask is if he engaged in terrorist activities *before* he arrived at Guantanamo. Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado From amara at amara.com Thu Jun 19 16:44:53 2008 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:44:53 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Programme Riz Khan: Guantanamo: The detainees Message-ID: Stefano Vaj: >As some kind of escape goats, or rather sacrificial lambs? :-) You ask that with a smile, jokingly, but I would answer that question with a 'YES', not jokingly. Also, since the U.S. military was apparently not caring too much who they picked up as long as the detainee looked the part (dark hair, eyes, beard), then it was an easy way for a poor tribal Afghan who didn't like their neighbor to make $5000. One might see the situation as Bush's way of improving the local Afghan economy. (ahem) Let's go back in time, and see what Homer might say about revenge- of those victims and perpetrators ... -------------- From Amara Graps to extropians at extropy.org Date: November 21, 2001 Subject: Homerian epics (was: French culture and extropianism) I think that the complex character Achilles in _the Iliad_, has a large value to transhumanists because his situations are more similar to what we are now, and what we will face in the near future. Achilles' struggles are primarily reflections of his fight with the *beast within*. It's a confrontation with the tensions within human nature that lurk in us underneath our civilization's veneer. Achilles withdraws from his community, a ruinous existence, then wrestles his beast in a more ruinous way via his vengeance. The reader then see what happens when vengeance goes too far. When he becomes angry, his anger does not allow him to accept changes or shifts in attitude, and he embarks upon a murderous rampage. Yet he undergoes a startling transformation. After he is wronged and becomes angry, he withdraws from his environment, and, while alone, realizes that the entire martial system of honor is bankrupt and based on a lie. Achilles' heroism at his end is quite different than Odysseus' too: Odysseus regains his kin through the sheer strength of his spirit and the power of his genius; Achilles loses what family he had, to claim some new sense of honor well beyond a world that he wants no part of. As in most of the Greek classics, the following important ideas are presented: learning comes through effort, men are social creatures, human life is tragically short and therefore comes with obligations, character is a matter of matching words with deeds, religion is separate from and subordinate to politics, private property should be immune from government coercion, the truth only emerges through dissent and open criticism, the most dangerous animal is the beast within us, leaders ignore the will of the assembly at their peril. In the Iliad, these ideas are again presented, but more honestly than the other epic, and without apology and elaboration. -------------- Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado From max at maxmore.com Thu Jun 19 22:34:13 2008 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:34:13 -0500 Subject: [ExI] US average life expectancy reached new high Message-ID: <20080619223414.BLWY17903.hrndva-omta05.mail.rr.com@D840DTB1.maxmore.com> Now 78. Some comments on this and comparisons to other countries by Ron Bailey: http://www.reason.com/news/show/127038.html Now, if we in the USA can just get rid of our dictatorial traffic laws and adopt more easy-going ones such as in the UK, the average life expectancy should go up again. On this, see, for instance, "Distracting Miss Daisy": http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/traffic Max Max More, Ph.D. Strategic Philosopher www.maxmore.com max at maxmore.com From amara at amara.com Fri Jun 20 03:51:48 2008 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:51:48 -0600 Subject: [ExI] The Total State Message-ID: > Amara writes > >> I found the State of Texas' actions to be a mind-numbing >> expression of among the worst of the U.S.' aggressive >> against-its-citizens, police-state, government-imposed >> purity criteria actions Lee Corbin: >Well, every country has its problems (for any given one of us). Some data. Any of these can be googled for more information. The Patriot Act, NSA domestic wiretapping, US prison ships, Extraordinary Rendition (torture by proxy), armed US Federal Air Marshals on transatlantic flights, the CIA Torture Manual, Capital Punishment, TSA, Echelon, Carnivore, Omnivore, TIA, Secure Flight, CAPPSII, the AAMVA Project, MATRIX, COINTELPRO, OFAC Scholary Publishing Censorship, the I-Visa, RFID-laden electronic passports, ChoicePoint, the Protect America Act (PAA), the 2006 Military Commissions Act (MCA), the Real ID Act, the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act, the FBI's Regional Data Exchange, DHS/Federal police access to military spy satellites, Bush Administration by-passing the the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, the Fraudulent Online Identity Sanctions Act, Guant?namo Bay, The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), the 2005 Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support, the militarization of law enforcement, the 2006 Military Commission Act, the No-Fly List, VoIP wiretapping, CALEA, surveillance against reporters, the DHS Automated Targeting System, and the Defense Authorization Act of 2007. The US Federal Government has completely withdrawn from the Human Rights Council, did not agree to the ban cluster bomb weapons with 111 other nations, and actively engages in the politicization of science. In my opinion, the U.S. is not yet Total State version 1.0, instead it is in version beta, by virtue of one simple observation: a black man who came from nowhere is now a leading contender for the position of the President of the United States. On the other hand, the recent reinstatement of Habeas Corpus [1], which should also be a good sign, gives me only mixed thoughts. My advice to readers here is to be aware of what the U.S. Government is actively doing to you. Other useful sites and documents: http://www.politechbot.com/ http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ http://wikileaks.org/ Amara --------- Reference [1] Reinstatement of Habeas Corpus Last week the Supreme court overruled the Bush Administration's suspension of Habeas Corpus for foreign prisoners still held in Guantanamo Bay. I'm not particularly reassured since the vote was a razor-thin 5-4 vote. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/14/AR2008061401541_2.html?sid=ST2008061401557 "But in some ways, the rules for the District Court are clearer this time. All foreign prisoners still held in Guantanamo have been deemed to have a right to challenge their imprisonment through a writ of habeas corpus in this court. Several dozen habeas cases were dismissed after Congress passed the 2006 Military Commissions Act, as judges concluded they no longer had jurisdiction to rule on the challenges." http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/weekinreview/15mahler.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5087&em&en=69decb1315deeefd&ex=1213588800 "Still, it's hard to know exactly what the ultimate effect of the court's enemy combatant decisions is going to be. Among the large questions left open is whether habeas corpus rights are available to detainees held outside American jurisdiction." http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91486801 "What impact will the ruling have on detainees being held in other American-run prisons overseas?" "The United States houses terrorism detainees at other prison camps around the world, such as Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. The Bush administration asserts the right to detain those detainees indefinitely without giving them any court access. The Supreme Court did not address what legal framework applies to those detainees. On the legal Web site Balkinization, Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman suggests that "the question will in each case be determined by a 'functional approach' involving multiple factors and, especially, 'practical concerns,' rather than by any formalist rules." " ------------------------- JUNE 12, 2008 Rome, Italy BERLUSCONI: Thank you, yes. We've been told that we'll have two questions from our U.S. guests and two questions from Italian journalists. And I would ask the President to just go ahead and start with the American journalists. BUSH: Oh, there you are, yes. Q: Mr. President, also back home, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo detainees have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts. Doesn't this rebuke of your policy on detainees validate the criticism that Gitmo has gotten all over the world, especially here in Europe? And for the Prime Minister, sir, who do you want to come see you as the next U.S. President? BUSH: First of all, it's a Supreme Court decision; we'll abide by the Court's decision. That doesn't mean I have to agree with it. It's a deeply divided Court, and I strongly agree with those who dissented, and their dissent was based upon their serious concerns about U.S. national security. Congress and the administration worked very carefully on a piece of legislation that set the appropriate procedures in place as to how to deal with the detainees. And we'll study this opinion, and we'll do so with this in mind, to determine whether or not additional legislation might be appropriate, so that we can safely say, or truly say to the American people: We're doing everything we can to protect you. ------------------------- From spike66 at att.net Fri Jun 20 03:38:25 2008 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:38:25 -0700 Subject: [ExI] woooohoooo! it's ice! In-Reply-To: <20080619223414.BLWY17903.hrndva-omta05.mail.rr.com@D840DTB1.maxmore.com> Message-ID: <200806200405.m5K453iH000275@andromeda.ziaspace.com> http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/mars-phoenix-tw.html {8-] spike From spike66 at att.net Fri Jun 20 03:41:52 2008 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:41:52 -0700 Subject: [ExI] woooohoooo! it's ice! Message-ID: <200806200408.m5K48XOY020143@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Here's NASA's site on the find: http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/06_19_pr.php Ohhh, this is kewallllll. Life is gooooood. > -----Original Message----- > From: spike [mailto:spike66 at att.net] > Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2008 8:38 PM > To: 'ExI chat list' > Subject: woooohoooo! it's ice! > > > > http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/mars-phoenix-tw.html > > > {8-] > > spike > From amara at amara.com Fri Jun 20 04:27:40 2008 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:27:40 -0600 Subject: [ExI] woooohoooo! it's ice! Message-ID: Dear Spike: Is this news? What do we know now that we didn't know after Mars Odyssey's discovery of ice in 2002 or Mars Express' multiple announcements of finding water? way past my bedtime, Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado From thespike at satx.rr.com Fri Jun 20 04:32:54 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:32:54 -0500 Subject: [ExI] woooohoooo! it's ice! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080619233145.022c8c08@satx.rr.com> At 10:27 PM 6/19/2008 -0600, Amara wrote: >What do we know now that we didn't know after >Mars Odyssey's discovery of ice in 2002 or Mars Express' multiple >announcements of finding water? Must say that was my reaction, too. Now if it'd been *rice* or even *lice* on Mars... Damien Broderick From spike66 at att.net Fri Jun 20 04:56:35 2008 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:56:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] woooohoooo! it's ice! In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200806200456.m5K4uZW3004718@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > Amara Graps > Subject: [ExI] woooohoooo! it's ice! > > Dear Spike: Is this news? What do we know now that we didn't > know after Mars Odyssey's discovery of ice in 2002 or Mars > Express' multiple announcements of finding water? > > way past my bedtime, > Amara Ja we knew there was water ice before. I didn't know there was big frozen chunks of it lying on the ground. I didn't realize there was water ice in its pure form. Recovering it will be easier than I had imagined. spike From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Jun 20 05:31:48 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:31:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers References: <580930c20806110229p36d0067eh3413add4200c0611@mail.gmail.com><012e01c8cbc3$4a5a6b00$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677><580930c20806120226rb652c3u3c63807612fcc47@mail.gmail.com><01a401c8cca2$64984c50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677><580930c20806121015n4b4ea1e0u1ad0fa8454855ce1@mail.gmail.com><02c101c8cf28$a259ba50$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677><580930c20806160644m7feb8476t15e0d83d55aae724@mail.gmail.com><7.0.1.0.2.20080616100045.023827e0@satx.rr.com><580930c20806161356xe82fa59x3f2220465e5a02cb@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <047e01c8d297$7bb0d420$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Gary wrote (Sent: Monday, June 16, 2008 4:50 PM) > Stefano Vaj said: >> Interestingly, however, the "meaning" of Dick's novels >> may be easily reversed in their cinematic versions... >> For instance, "Do Androids Dream of [Electric] Sheep?" >> is definitely anti-tech, but my grasp of Blade Runner is >> that replicants are the tragic heroes most of people are >> going to identify with... Well, not me :-) > I didn't really sympathize with the replicants until the end > when it appears that their leader at least, described his > angst in exquisite detail and it was revealed that the girl > our human hero had fallen in love with was next year's model. As for me, I sympathized with the "good" or "okay" replicants, and loathed the killers and murderers among them who were completely amoral at best. So I'm a little surprised at the attitudes you guys have, or at least the way the above is phrased. Damien wrote > In the book, it's clear that [Deckard, the detective protagonist] > is human; the director argues, however, that he, too, is a > replicant with fake memories, rubbish, I say. Complete rubbish > doomed to die soon, and has dropped clues to this through the > subsequent "director's cuts." I only saw one of those awful "director's cuts", where they utterly mangled and destroyed the wonderful, unforgetable final sentence in the original. Well, that was the way it struck me, anyhow. Lee From sparkle_robot at yahoo.com Fri Jun 20 05:42:32 2008 From: sparkle_robot at yahoo.com (Anne Corwin) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:42:32 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] woooohoooo! it's ice! In-Reply-To: <7.0.1.0.2.20080619233145.022c8c08@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: <747813.29491.qm@web56505.mail.re3.yahoo.com> --- On Thu, 6/19/08, Damien Broderick wrote: > At 10:27 PM 6/19/2008 -0600, Amara wrote: > > >What do we know now that we didn't know after > >Mars Odyssey's discovery of ice in 2002 or Mars > Express' multiple > >announcements of finding water? > > Must say that was my reaction, too. Now if it'd been > *rice* or even > *lice* on Mars... > > Damien Broderick Well, *I* thought it was cool news -- while not necessarily NEW news, it's another data point. - Anne From benboc at lineone.net Fri Jun 20 07:25:28 2008 From: benboc at lineone.net (ben) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 08:25:28 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Economics of SENS In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <485B5B68.5050208@lineone.net> The Avantguardian said: >A question entered my mind today: With rising medical costs and an ever >increasing population of elderly forced to retire at age 65 just when they >start needing the medical care the most, would the added productivity of SENS >and the elimination of the medical costs associated with aging simply by >preventing it not be more cost effective for individuals, insurance companies, >and society as a whole in the long run? I don't have any numbers but I suspect >that government/private investment in SENS could conceivably pay for itself in >the span of several decades. I mean why let a productive tax-payer, consumer, >or policy holder steadily become a burden on society by letting him get old >when it is preventable? Any thoughts? Seems obvious enough. But only if you actually believe it's possible. And how many people do? How many governments do? And even then, if you do convince people it's possible, usually the first thing they do is think up reasons why it would be a terrible idea. Mostly silly reasons, yes, but that's not the point. Don't underestimate how deeply 'deathism' is entrenched in human psychology. Finally, if you did manage to convince a government that it's possible, what do you think that govt. would do? Given that the main function of govt's is to forcibly (or financially) stop people from doing things? Private investment, sure, but please, please, leave the guvmint out of it. Look at what the American govt. has done for stem-cell research. And can you imagine a NASA-style organisation for life-extension? Without the hairs on the back of your neck rising up? ben zaiboc From dharris234 at mindspring.com Fri Jun 20 07:09:07 2008 From: dharris234 at mindspring.com (David C. Harris) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:09:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Total State In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <485B5793.9050403@mindspring.com> Amara Graps wrote: > > Lee Corbin: > > Well, every country has its problems (for any given one of us). > Some data. Any of these can be googled for more information. > > The Patriot Act, NSA domestic wiretapping, US prison ships, > Extraordinary Rendition (torture by proxy), armed US Federal Air > Marshals on transatlantic flights, the CIA Torture Manual, Capital > Punishment, TSA, Echelon, Carnivore, Omnivore, TIA, Secure Flight, > CAPPSII, the AAMVA Project, MATRIX, COINTELPRO, OFAC Scholary > Publishing Censorship, the I-Visa, RFID-laden electronic passports, > ChoicePoint, the Protect America Act (PAA), the 2006 Military > Commissions Act (MCA), the Real ID Act, the Child Protection and > Obscenity Enforcement Act, the FBI's Regional Data Exchange, > DHS/Federal police access to military spy satellites, Bush > Administration by-passing the the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance > Act (FISA) of 1978, the Fraudulent Online Identity Sanctions Act, > Guant?namo Bay, The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North > America (SPP), the 2005 Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil > Support, the militarization of law enforcement, the 2006 Military > Commission Act, the No-Fly List, VoIP wiretapping, CALEA, > surveillance against reporters, the DHS Automated Targeting System, > and the Defense Authorization Act of 2007. > > The US Federal Government has completely withdrawn from the Human > Rights Council, did not agree to the ban cluster bomb weapons with > 111 other nations, and actively engages in the politicization of > science. > > In my opinion, the U.S. is not yet Total State version 1.0, instead > it is in version beta, by virtue of one simple observation: a black > man who came from nowhere is now a leading contender for the position > of the President of the United States. > > On the other hand, the recent reinstatement of Habeas Corpus [1], > which should also be a good sign, gives me only mixed thoughts. > > My advice to readers here is to be aware of what the U.S. Government > is actively doing to you. > > Other useful sites and documents: > > http://www.politechbot.com/ > http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ > http://wikileaks.org/ > > Amara That's a horrifying collection of some of the reasons I have been an ACLU member since I was 17. Maybe my original inspiration was having an FBI agent come to our house and ask my father about a minister/psychologist who had been a friend to me when I was a very small child. He believed that Jesus message applied to social issues, which was a suspect idea in the Sen. Joseph McCarthy era. - David From pharos at gmail.com Fri Jun 20 08:20:38 2008 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 08:20:38 +0000 Subject: [ExI] US average life expectancy reached new high In-Reply-To: <20080619223414.BLWY17903.hrndva-omta05.mail.rr.com@D840DTB1.maxmore.com> References: <20080619223414.BLWY17903.hrndva-omta05.mail.rr.com@D840DTB1.maxmore.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 10:34 PM, Max More wrote: > Now 78. Some comments on this and comparisons to other countries by Ron Bailey: > http://www.reason.com/news/show/127038.html > > Now, if we in the USA can just get rid of our dictatorial traffic > laws and adopt more easy-going ones such as in the UK, the average > life expectancy should go up again. On this, see, for instance, > "Distracting Miss Daisy": http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/traffic > Ron makes some good points in his article, but misses the cautionary comment in the CDC report. The preliminary number of deaths in the United States in 2006 was 2,425,900, a 22,117 decrease from the 2005 total. With a rapidly growing older population, declines in the number of deaths (as opposed to death rates) are unusual, and the 2006 decline is likely the result of more mild influenza mortality in 2006 compared with 2005. ------------- So don't start cheering too quickly. As they say in the UK, there's nothing like a hard winter and a good flu season for culling the old folk. The road deaths comparison between the US and UK misses the main causes of road deaths. The article claims that the over-signage on US roads is training drivers to drive by reading the signs rather than watching the road conditions and also causing driver inattention to road conditions. While this may be a valid point, surely it is a very minor point. The main group having road accidents in the US are young male drivers. And I don't think that is because they are spending their time reading road signs. More like ignoring them completely. DIU is also still a big factor, as is not wearing seat belts or crash helmets. The US also has vastly more rural roads where the majority of accidents occur. There are other differences, but it is a complex subject. BillK From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Jun 20 12:15:49 2008 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:15:49 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Weiner: The Human Use of Human Beings Message-ID: <006a01c8d2cf$609a0930$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> This is a marvelous book and I am enjoying many elements of it but can anyone explain to me precisely what Weiner means by "human use of human beings"? Weiner states that its thesis is that society "can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it . between man and machine and between machine and machine." etc. Just what is the "human use" of human beings? (I am not looking for an abstract or poetic description - I can do that. I am interested in a more practical interpretation.) Can a scientist on the list or someone who understands probability theory explain the books' title? Many thanks, Natasha -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Fri Jun 20 12:56:46 2008 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:56:46 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Weiner: The Human Use of Human Beings In-Reply-To: <006a01c8d2cf$609a0930$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> References: <006a01c8d2cf$609a0930$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 1:15 PM, Natasha Vita-More wrote: > This is a marvelous book and I am enjoying many elements of it but can > anyone explain to me precisely what Weiner means by "human use of human > beings"? Weiner states that its thesis is that society "can only be > understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities > which belong to it ? between man and machine and between machine and > machine?" etc. Just what is the "human use" of human beings? (I am not > looking for an abstract or poetic description ? I can do that. I am > interested in a more practical interpretation.) Can a scientist on the list > or someone who understands probability theory explain the books' title? > I think this article from Southern Connecticut State University explains it. Norbert Wiener's Foundation of Computer Ethics Terrell Ward Bynum In the late 1940s and early 1950s, visionary mathematician/philosopher Norbert Wiener founded computer ethics as a field of academic research. In his groundbreaking book, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950, 1954), Wiener developed a powerful method for identifying and analyzing the enormous impacts of information and communication technology (ICT) upon human values like life, health, happiness, security, knowledge and creativity. Wiener based his foundation for computer ethics upon a "cybernetic" view of human nature that leads readily to an ethically suggestive account of the purpose of a human life. ------------------- He means 'human use' as in fulfilling the meaning of what it is to be human. BillK From kanzure at gmail.com Fri Jun 20 13:13:33 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 08:13:33 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Weiner: The Human Use of Human Beings In-Reply-To: References: <006a01c8d2cf$609a0930$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> Message-ID: <200806200813.33442.kanzure@gmail.com> On Friday 20 June 2008, BillK wrote: > He means 'human use' as in fulfilling the meaning of what it is to be > human. Would the book also be aptly titled "Your Use of Your Human Body" ? - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From natasha at natasha.cc Fri Jun 20 13:52:26 2008 From: natasha at natasha.cc (Natasha Vita-More) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 08:52:26 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Weiner: The Human Use of Human Beings In-Reply-To: References: <006a01c8d2cf$609a0930$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> Message-ID: <009c01c8d2dc$df87b4b0$0201a8c0@natasha39y28ni> BillK wrote: > I think this article from Southern Connecticut State University explains it. > um_wiener.html> ------------------- > > He means 'human use' as in fulfilling the meaning of what it is to be human. Excellent reference. Thank you. Natasha Natasha Vita-More BFA, MS, MPhil/PhD Candidate, Planetary Collegium Faculty of Technology, School of Computers, Communication and Electronics University of Plymouth, UK Arts and Design - NBIC+ Convergence H+ Europe From spike66 at att.net Fri Jun 20 14:25:12 2008 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:25:12 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Total State In-Reply-To: <485B5793.9050403@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <200806201425.m5KEPCEx023797@andromeda.ziaspace.com> ... > David C. Harris ... > > That's a horrifying collection of some of the reasons I have > been an ACLU member since I was 17... - David David where the heck were you guys when the Texas authorities were raiding the FLDS compound? spike From amara at amara.com Fri Jun 20 17:26:29 2008 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:26:29 -0600 Subject: [ExI] The Total State Message-ID: Amara Graps wrote: > The Patriot Act, NSA domestic wiretapping, US prison ships, > Extraordinary Rendition (torture by proxy), armed US Federal Air > Marshals on transatlantic flights, the CIA Torture Manual, Capital > Punishment, TSA, Echelon, Carnivore, Omnivore, TIA, Secure Flight, > CAPPSII, the AAMVA Project, MATRIX, COINTELPRO, OFAC Scholary > Publishing Censorship, the I-Visa, RFID-laden electronic passports, > ChoicePoint, the Protect America Act (PAA), the 2006 Military > Commissions Act (MCA), the Real ID Act, the Child Protection and > Obscenity Enforcement Act, the FBI's Regional Data Exchange, > DHS/Federal police access to military spy satellites, Bush > Administration by-passing the the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance > Act (FISA) of 1978, the Fraudulent Online Identity Sanctions Act, > Guant?namo Bay, The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North > America (SPP), the 2005 Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil > Support, the militarization of law enforcement, the 2006 Military > Commission Act, the No-Fly List, VoIP wiretapping, CALEA, > surveillance against reporters, the DHS Automated Targeting System, > and the Defense Authorization Act of 2007. > > The US Federal Government has completely withdrawn from the Human > Rights Council, did not agree to the ban cluster bomb weapons with > 111 other nations, and actively engages in the politicization of > science. > David C. Harris dharris234 at mindspring.com: >That's a horrifying collection of some of the reasons I have been an ACLU >member since I was 17. The primary resource I used to find the correct names to the programs was the Politech mailing list. Declan and his strong readerbase at Politech have been tracking these government actions for the last 15 years. If you are not familiar with Politech, take a look. Some of the ACLU are Politech participants/readers. The EFF is actively involved in Declan's list, as well. He does cover legislation in all countries, however the focus is on the US because of his readerbase (who send him material). http://www.politechbot.com/info/about/ "Politech is the oldest Internet resource devoted exclusively to politics and technology. Launched in 1994, the Politech mailing list has chronicled the growing intersection of law, culture, technology, politics, and law. Since 2000, so has the Politech web site." You can follow archives back to 2003 here: http://politechbot.com/pipermail/politech/ including downloading an mbox-formated file to browse with any text reader or a Unix mail reader. Historically (early - middle 90s) there was a relatively large overlap of the groups of Extropians, Cypherpunks and Politech folks following privacy, the legislation of technology, and the government use of technology especially when violating civil liberties, but I think that Declan's Politech efforts since have been deepest and most consistent to follow the especially dangerous trends. Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado From robert.bradbury at gmail.com Fri Jun 20 17:46:19 2008 From: robert.bradbury at gmail.com (Robert Bradbury) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:46:19 -0400 Subject: [ExI] woooohoooo! it's ice! In-Reply-To: <200806200456.m5K4uZW3004718@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200806200456.m5K4uZW3004718@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 12:56 AM, spike wrote: > > Ja we knew there was water ice before. I didn't know there was big frozen > chunks of it lying on the ground. I didn't realize there was water ice in > its pure form. Recovering it will be easier than I had imagined. > Spike, you need a bit more education in geology and planetary sciences, if I may offer my opinion. You of all people ought to be able to "imagine" what worlds look like [1]. What the hell are you going to do if a black hole comes rushing through our solar system? You need to have plan A, plan B, and plan C (this is something I learned from working in Russia). Robert 1. Isn't Lockheed making most of these satellites/landers? If one cannot envision what is going to be found how can they be designed properly? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Fri Jun 20 18:16:52 2008 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:16:52 +0000 Subject: [ExI] War deaths not decreasing - just underestimated Message-ID: Worldwide War Deaths Underestimated THURSDAY, June 19 (HealthDay News) -- Wars around the world have killed three times more people over the past half-century than previously estimated, a new study suggests. In the study, Obermeyer's group compared data on war deaths from eyewitnesses and the media from 13 countries over the past 50 years with peacetime data in the United Nations World Health Surveys, which was collected after the end of the wars. This method avoids problems collecting data during active combat, and also reduces counting deaths twice or exaggerating the number, Obermeyer said. "There is a notion in political thought that the number of deaths due to war has been declining in recent years," Obermeyer noted. "That is attributed to a lot of different things, but among them technological innovations like 'smart' bombs and different strategic priorities. This idea appears to be supported by media reports. But what we are finding is these reports are not a reflection of reality." Contemporary media reports of deaths are not to be fully trusted, Obermeyer added. "The reason we should be skeptical of media reports is that they are subject to political pressures and cannot always be verified," he said. "These numbers can be pushed up or down, depending upon what kind of political pressure is being exerted." Richard Garfield, a professor of clinical international nursing at Columbia University in New York City and the author of an accompanying editorial in the journal, said that even this method underestimates the number of people killed in wars. "Even though the data on war deaths is not very good, it is much better . . . in poor developing countries -- where virtually all wars now are -- than it was 10 or 20 years ago," Garfield said. However, all deaths because of war are not being counted, Garfield said, since even Obermeyer's team left out the more indirect deaths from starvation, infectious disease and other illnesses, and forms of injury not directly linked to armed combat. "We are counting more of the violent deaths, but we only irregularly address indirect deaths, which may be far greater than combatant deaths," he added. ----------------- Complete research report here: ---------------- So, the optimistic view that humans are killing fewer of each other in recent years appears to be incorrect. :( BillK From pharos at gmail.com Fri Jun 20 21:04:13 2008 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:04:13 +0100 Subject: [ExI] woooohoooo! it's ice! In-Reply-To: References: <200806200456.m5K4uZW3004718@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 6:46 PM, Robert Bradbury wrote: > Spike, you need a bit more education in geology and planetary sciences, if I > may offer my opinion. You of all people ought to be able to "imagine" what > worlds look like [1]. What the hell are you going to do if a black hole > comes rushing through our solar system? You need to have plan A, plan B, > and plan C (this is something I learned from working in Russia). > Well, if the scientists on the Phoenix team are getting all excited about finding proof of ice on Mars and Google news has over 1000 news items about it, I think we can allow Spike to have a modest WoooHooo! Not too much, of course. We have our cool image to maintain. ;) BillK From lcorbin at rawbw.com Fri Jun 20 20:25:31 2008 From: lcorbin at rawbw.com (Lee Corbin) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:25:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Groups References: <4854F7BC.7060108@lineone.net> <48572A9A.3080207@comcast.net> <1213769665_15681@s5.cableone.net> Message-ID: <002201c8d31f$9d41a0f0$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Keith wrote (Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2008 11:11 PM) > Brent wrote: > >> It's time for intelligent people to finally do the >> cooperative work required to develop systems that can enable us to >> recognize there is something way better than dying and rotting >> everyone in the grave. > > Probably everyone here--or at least a substantial majority--agrees > with you. Why are we so ineffective? For example, I think I know a > way to get humanity out of the energy crisis, but the chances are not > good that I will be able to interest enough people for the new > concept to even be evaluated. It seems likely that there is a > fundamental mismatch between people like us and the ability to get > real world changes implemented. "Why are we so ineffective?" is a very good question. Of course, it should be placed in some perspective such as "compared to what? compared to whom?". Nonetheless, I still think your observation/question a good one, and I can think of several possible answers (all of which might aid explanation). #1 doers vs. thinkers #2 mailing lists draw ADHD types #3 numerous interests dilute effort #4 finishing usually requires some very unpleasant work #5 many of us have occupations or hobbies that take most of our time #6 teamwork often required, and you aren't always in charge #1 Doers vs. Thinkers. There have always been the visionaries, the dreamers, and the theoreticians, like Keynes and Descartes, who are said to have done their best work lying in bed. I don't think we'd want either of them on a cryonics suspension team, nor would they be of much use in a materials lab. It makes sense that people who often *discuss* ideas, who find shooting off their mouths about a variety of subjects very pleasant and satisfying, and who love ideas and thinking in general, tend not to be doers. Of course there are exceptions. #2 Mailing lists draw ADHD types Nothing is as conducive to a spirit that likes to flit from one thing to another than hanging out on a half a dozen mailing lists. There is a constant stream of unpredictable new stimuli, and any of them can appeal to some totally optional interaction on one's part. Hence, probably we'll count among our numbers many who either have ADHD-like symptoms or who simply enjoy endless variety (within, say, the intellectual realm). #3 Numerous Interests Dilute Effort That's rather self-explanatory. Now, outstanding achievement and accomplishment almost always require tremendously sustained total focus. My book group (we read many diverse books) is currently reading "Human Achievement" by Charles Murray, and he makes this point very well. >From what I hear, Robert Frietas is an exemplar among "us". People marvel that his books and research can actually be conducted entirely by one man. You may very well get the joke < If Jack Bauer had been a Spartan, the movie would have been called "1". > which indicates that you know something of recent movies as well as know something about what happens on Cable TV. So I suggest < If Robert Frietas got Jack Bauer jokes, he probably wouldn't be Robert Frietas.> So even if you don't have any ADHD-like symptoms, and are both a thinker and a doer, you may very well have such diversified interests and parcel your time out across so many projects that being very effective on any of them is quite difficult. Vladimir Lenin would have banned the lot of us from his organization nucleus in 1916, for, to be a successful revolutionary requires singled-minded focus. #4 Finishing Usually Requires some very Unpleasant Work Many highly significant projects that could influence or affect many people require solid dedication to messy details and to some very obnoxious subtasks. This is one reason that quite a few people begin far, far more projects than they finish. We're all living pretty well, and there is hardly a need to really do the dirty work. It's a lot easier for me to complete infinitely boring details at work, where my boss will be upset if I don't finish things right. (Besides, I have very little choice if I want to continue getting paychecks.) After Rossini became well-to-do (based on his earlier work) his musical output virtually ceased. It may very well have been the case that there were ugly details to take care of to bring any score to completion, and he didn't feel like it when his livelihood no longer depended upon it. #5 Many of us have Occupations or Hobbies that take Most of our Time I'm often amazed when I see how many people---even correcting for time zone---manage to post a lot during their normal working day. (Pace, Larks vs. Owls.) I'm only posting today because I have the day off, but even on normal days, I usually post only after getting too tired to read math anymore. In other words, many of us are also "bogged down" by certain other activities we either have to do (or that we love), which we put a premium on---and so once again simply could not make Lenin's pick list. #6 Teamwork Often Required, and You Aren't Always In Charge Many big scale projects also require teamwork. And many of us are rather too individualistic to be a good team members---unless everyone does what we tell them to do. * * * So NATURALLY it must be immediately said that folks accurately described by one or more of the above can be perfectly satisfied, or nearly so, with their own productivity and their diverse activities, and the way they feel that they've chosen to conduct their lives. Suppose you could swallow a magic tablet that would give you the urge and the need to devote total focus to a single thing 12hr after 12hr day. How many of us would really take it? Far from everyone, I imagine. Lee P.S. If everyone on the show did what Jack Bauer told them to do, it wouldn't be called "24". It would be called "8". And, did you know? When Jack Bauer was a child, he made his mother eat his vegetables! From dharris234 at mindspring.com Fri Jun 20 23:47:57 2008 From: dharris234 at mindspring.com (David C. Harris) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:47:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Total State In-Reply-To: <200806201425.m5KEPCEx023797@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200806201425.m5KEPCEx023797@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <485C41AD.9090009@mindspring.com> spike wrote: > > ... > >> David C. Harris >> > ... > >> That's a horrifying collection of some of the reasons I have >> been an ACLU member since I was 17... - David >> > > > David where the heck were you guys when the Texas authorities were raiding > the FLDS compound? > > spike > We can't cover everything, so sometimes we watch and, if needed, advise in the background. I know when I heard about the FLDS raids having a single young woman calling for help as the "probable cause", and then they couldn't find the young woman, I was thinking that the whole operation might be thrown out as the "fruit of the poisonous tree". See if that's not a familiar phrase. We try to keep government reigned in by making sure the laws are not bypassed. And of course we're not perfect, nor in agreement with everyone's values on every issue. - David From spike66 at att.net Sat Jun 21 01:09:36 2008 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:09:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] woooohoooo! it's ice! In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200806210110.m5L19e64006433@andromeda.ziaspace.com> ________________________________ From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Robert Bradbury Sent: Friday, June 20, 2008 10:46 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] woooohoooo! it's ice! On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 12:56 AM, spike wrote: ...Spike, you need a bit more education in geology and planetary sciences, if I may offer my opinion... Ja, this lander gave us exactly this. ...Isn't Lockheed making most of these satellites/landers?... Yes. ...If one cannot envision what is going to be found how can they be designed properly?... Exactly so, and this one was not designed properly. The water content of the soil was sufficiently high as to make it clumpy. Consequently it wouldn't drop down into the ovens until the moisture had sublimated, leading the analysts to the incorrect conclusion that the soil was dry. ...You of all people ought to be able to "imagine" what worlds look like... I confess that the water in the form of ice chunks took me by surprise. I am having a hard time imagining how it got in that form and stayed there this whole time. Why would not it form hydrates? Why would it be so pure as to form white chunks? What gases are trapped within to make it white? CO2? Why were the chunks of ice that size? ...What the hell are you going to do if a black hole comes rushing through our solar system? ...Robert That is a threat on which I wouldn't spend a minute of worry, not a second. Evidently rogue black holes are exceedingly rare; otherwise the planetary orbits would be more eccentric than they are. Apparently we haven't had a black hole visit in the past several billion years at least. No need to postulate an exotic threat: the risk of an ordinary rock hitting the planet and triggering a nuclear war is thousands of times higher, ja? spike From hkhenson at rogers.com Sat Jun 21 00:56:37 2008 From: hkhenson at rogers.com (hkhenson) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:56:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Sarcasm Message-ID: <1214009966_85@s8.cableone.net> http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080620/sc_livescience/sarcasmseenasevolutionarysurvivalskill;_ylt=AmUrn21daOHtgsQar9PtRycDW7oF Someone might hunt up some more background on this. I was a bit surprised that the brain seems to have a specific region that deals with sarcasm. Personally I don't think I use sarcasm very often and (especially in an all text channel) don't always pick up on it. Thanks to the person who pointed this article out to me. Keith From thespike at satx.rr.com Sat Jun 21 01:39:53 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:39:53 -0500 Subject: [ExI] woooohoooo! it's ice! In-Reply-To: <200806210110.m5L19e64006433@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200806210110.m5L19e64006433@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080620203854.023ce640@satx.rr.com> At 06:09 PM 6/20/2008 -0700, Spike wrote: >What gases are trapped within to make it white? >CO2? That was my guess. Is there any evidence that it's not predominantly or even *all* CO2? Damien Broderick From amara at amara.com Sat Jun 21 02:07:07 2008 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:07:07 -0600 Subject: [ExI] woooohoooo! it's ice! Message-ID: Damien Broderick : >That was my guess. Is there any evidence that it's not predominantly >or even *all* CO2? http://www.planetary.org/blog/ "Many people have been asking me, can't this be carbon dioxide ice? It's true that carbon dioxide ice can form on Mars. However, the ambient temperature at the Phoenix landing site is way too high for it to be stable for even a couple of hours." Amara -- Amara Graps, PhD www.amara.com Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado From spike66 at att.net Sat Jun 21 01:20:17 2008 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:20:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] woooohoooo! it's ice! In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200806210220.m5L2KGmf006560@andromeda.ziaspace.com> > ...I think we can allow Spike to have a modest WoooHooo! Thanks BillK, it was a most hearty and sincere woohoo. > Not too much, of course. We have our cool image to maintain. ;) BillK HA! I always KNEW there is an advantage to being a geek. I *have* no cool image to maintain, being a hardline nerd from back before it was the fashion. I intentionally destroy cool, in word and in dress. Now I am free to woohoo any scientific discovery. {8-] spike From stathisp at gmail.com Sat Jun 21 02:35:00 2008 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2008 12:35:00 +1000 Subject: [ExI] Sarcasm In-Reply-To: <1214009966_85@s8.cableone.net> References: <1214009966_85@s8.cableone.net> Message-ID: 2008/6/21 hkhenson : > Someone might hunt up some more background on this. I was a bit > surprised that the brain seems to have a specific region that deals > with sarcasm. Personally I don't think I use sarcasm very often and > (especially in an all text channel) don't always pick up on it. Does evidence from deficits produced by brain lesions necessarily show that there is a specific region that deals with sarcasm and that it was selected for this purpose by evolution? -- Stathis Papaioannou From thespike at satx.rr.com Sat Jun 21 02:45:05 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:45:05 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Sarcasm In-Reply-To: References: <1214009966_85@s8.cableone.net> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080620214109.024fd200@satx.rr.com> At 12:35 PM 6/21/2008 +1000, Stathis wrote: >2008/6/21 hkhenson : > > > Someone might hunt up some more background on this. I was a bit > > surprised that the brain seems to have a specific region that deals > > with sarcasm. Personally I don't think I use sarcasm very often and > > (especially in an all text channel) don't always pick up on it. > >Does evidence from deficits produced by brain lesions necessarily show >that there is a specific region that deals with sarcasm and that it >was selected for this purpose by evolution? Interestingly, this reply would become sarcasm if rendered as: So evidence from *deficits* produced by *brain lesions* necessarily shows that there is a specific region that deals with sarcasm, and that it was *selected* for this purpose by evolution, hmm? [emphasis optional] Apologies to Stathis if the original form of the question was *intended* sarcastically. :) Damien Broderick From pjmanney at gmail.com Sat Jun 21 03:11:40 2008 From: pjmanney at gmail.com (PJ Manney) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:11:40 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Pattern Recognition Theory of Humour Message-ID: <29666bf30806202011h783e38b0yd6773c3e1982f44d@mail.gmail.com> Does this mean that Stephen Colbert really IS a genius? God, how I'd love the Pythons to get a hold of this... Can't you just see the Ministry of Humour? PJ innovations-report 13.06.2008 URL: http://www.innovations-report.de/html/reports/life_sciences/report-112267.html Humour is shown to be fundamental to our success as a species 13.06.2008 First universal theory of humour answers how and why we find things funny Published today The Pattern Recognition Theory of Humour by Alastair Clarke answers the centuries old question of what is humour. Clarke explains how and why we find things funny and identifies the reason humour is common to all human societies, its fundamental role in the evolution of homo sapiens and its continuing importance in the cognitive development of infants. Clarke explains: "For some time now it's been assumed that a global theory of humour is impossible. This theory changes thousands of years of incorrect analyses and mini-theories that have applied to only a small proportion of instances of humour. It offers a vital answer as to why humour exists in every human society" Previous theories from philosophers, literary critics and psychologists have focused on what we laugh at, on 'getting the joke'. "Humour cannot be explained in terms of content or subject matter. A group of individuals can respond completely differently to the same content, and so to understand humour we have to examine the structures underlying it and analyse the process by which each individual responds to them. Pattern Recognition Theory is an evolutionary and cognitive explanation of how and why an individual finds something funny. Effectively it explains that humour occurs when the brain recognizes a pattern that surprises it, and that this recognition is rewarded with the experience of the humorous response." says Clarke. Humour is not about comedy it is about a fundamental cognitive function. Clarke explains: "An ability to recognize patterns instantly and unconsciously has proved a fundamental weapon in the cognitive arsenal of human beings." Recognising patterns enables us to quickly understand our environment and function effectively within it: language, which is unique to humans, is based on patterns. Clarke's theory has wider implications: "It sheds light on infantile cognitive development, will lead to a revision of tests on 'humour' to diagnose psychological or neurological conditions and will have implications regarding the development of language. It will lead to a clarification of whether other animals have a sense of humour, and has an important role to play in the production of artificial intelligence being that will feel a bit less robotic thanks to its sense of humour." Alastair Clarke explains: "The development of pattern recognition as displayed in humour could form the basis of humankind's instinctive linguistic ability. Syntax and grammar function in fundamental patterns for which a child has an innate facility. All that differs from one individual to the next is the content of those patterns in terms of vocabulary." Pattern Recognition Theory identifies further correlation between the development of humour and the development of cognitive ability in infants. Previous research has shown that children respond to humour long before they can comprehend language or develop long-term memory. Humour is present as one of the early fundamental cognitive processes. Alastair Clarke explains: "Amusing childish games such as peek-a-boo and clap hands all exhibit the precise mechanism of humour as it appears in any adult form. Peek-a-boo can elicit a humorous response in infants as young as four months, and is, effectively, a simple process of surprise repetition, forming a clear, basic pattern. As the infant develops, the patterns in childish humour become more complex and compounded and attain spatial as well as temporal elements until, finally, the child begins to grapple with the patterns involved in linguistic humour." Alastair Clarke explains that the Pattern Recognition Theory "can not say categorically what is funny. The individual is of paramount importance in determining what they find amusing, bringing memories, associations, meta-meaning, disposition, their ability to recognize patterns and their comprehension of similarity to the equation. But the following two examples illustrate its basic structure. A common form of humour is the juxtaposition of two pictures, normally of people, in whom we recognize a similarity. What we are witnessing here is spatial repetition, a simple two-term pattern featuring the outline or the features of the first repeated in those of the second. If the pattern is sufficiently convincing (as in the degree to which we perceive repetition), and we are surprised by recognizing it, we will find the stimulus amusing." "As a second example, related to the first but in a different medium, stand-up comedy regularly features what we might call the It's so true form of humour. As with the first example, the brain recognizes a two-term pattern of repetition between the comedian's depiction and its retained mental image, and if the recognition is surprising, it will be found amusing. The individual may be surprised to hear such things being talked about in public, perhaps because they are taboo, or because the individual has never heard them being articulated before. The only difference between the two examples is that in the first the pattern is recognized between one photograph and the next, and in the second it occurs between the comedian's words and the mental image retained by the individual of the matter being portrayed." "Both of these examples use simple patterns of exact repetition, even if the fidelity of that repetition is poor (for example if the photographs are only vaguely similar). But pattern types can be surprisingly varied, including reflection, reversal, minification and magnification and so on. Sarcasm, for example, functions around a basic pattern of reversal, otherwise known as repetition in opposites. Patterns can also contain many stages, whereas the ones depicted here feature only two terms." Nicola Hern | Source: alphagalileo From neptune at superlink.net Sat Jun 21 04:08:04 2008 From: neptune at superlink.net (Technotranscendence) Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2008 00:08:04 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Pattern Recognition Theory of Humour References: <29666bf30806202011h783e38b0yd6773c3e1982f44d@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <978C4E32F7424102A056E7586F99A79B@technotr9881e5> On Friday, June 20, 2008 11:11 PM PJ Manney pjmanney at gmail.com wrote: > Does this mean that Stephen Colbert really IS a genius? God, how I'd > love the Pythons to get a hold of this... Can't you just see the > Ministry of Humour? > > PJ > > innovations-report 13.06.2008 > URL: > http://www.innovations-report.de/html/reports/life_sciences/report-112267.html Sounds a bit like Arthur Koestler's views on humor. Regards, Dan From thespike at satx.rr.com Sat Jun 21 04:37:32 2008 From: thespike at satx.rr.com (Damien Broderick) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:37:32 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Pattern Recognition Theory of Humour In-Reply-To: <978C4E32F7424102A056E7586F99A79B@technotr9881e5> References: <29666bf30806202011h783e38b0yd6773c3e1982f44d@mail.gmail.com> <978C4E32F7424102A056E7586F99A79B@technotr9881e5> Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.2.20080620232900.02386ce8@satx.rr.com> At 12:08 AM 6/21/2008 -0400, Dan wrote: >Sounds a bit like Arthur Koestler's views on humor. Very much so. I found Koestler's model pretty persuasive when I read it in THE ACT OF CREATION in 1964; the strange part was that the examples of humor that he presented to display his theory in action were *terrible*. I've just been discussing humor/wit with Lee Corbin, as it happens; he cited something here on the list I found instantly funny, even though I'm not a regular viewer of *24*: >When Jack Bauer was a child, he made his mother eat his vegetables! A good fit for the template theory. Another I mentioned offlist to Lee: Where I lived in Melbourne, in a light industrial/ethnic-mix area, I came across a Greek mattress factory one day and burst out laughing uncontrollably at their sign: SPARTAN BEDDING. These are not *outrageously* funny, but they're better exemplars than anything Koestler came up with and they both involve apophenia. Damien Broderick From kanzure at gmail.com Sat Jun 21 04:45:27 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:45:27 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Groups In-Reply-To: <002201c8d31f$9d41a0f0$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> References: <1213769665_15681@s5.cableone.net> <002201c8d31f$9d41a0f0$6401a8c0@homeef7b612677> Message-ID: <200806202345.27606.kanzure@gmail.com> On Friday 20 June 2008, Lee Corbin wrote: > Many highly significant projects that could influence or affect many > people require solid dedication to messy details and to some very > obnoxious subtasks. This is one reason that quite a few people > begin far, far more projects than they finish. We're all living > pretty well, and there is hardly a need to really do the dirty work. > It's a lot easier for me to complete infinitely boring details at > work, where my boss will be upset if I don't finish things right. > (Besides, I have very little choice if I want to continue getting > paychecks.) I don't know about this. I think many of us would be willing to take the obnoxious subtasks if they were to come our way; I certainly would. The difficulty is in figuring out what those subtasks actually are. "The thing wrong with the world is that people don't have instructions." -- Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah http://oscomak.net/ - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From kanzure at gmail.com Sat Jun 21 04:47:42 2008 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:47:42 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Sarcasm In-Reply-To: <1214009966_85@s8.cableone.net> References: <1214009966_85@s8.cableone.net> Message-ID: <200806202347.42949.kanzure@gmail.com> On Friday 20 June 2008, hkhenson wrote: > http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080620/sc_livescience/sarcasmse >enasevolutionarysurvivalskill;_ylt=AmUrn21daOHtgsQar9PtRycDW7oF > > Someone might hunt up some more background on this. ?I was a bit > surprised that the brain seems to have a specific region that deals > with sarcasm. ?Personally I don't think I use sarcasm very often and > (especially in an all text channel) don't always pick up on it. There was an article I read a while ago that addressed all of these articles that try to find regions of the brain that are associated with certain processes. Ah, this was the same guy that wrote the Times bestseller regarding ants and society, emergence and the like. He also wrote a book about brains and his own personal journey into the abyss regarding neurofeedback, fMRI, etc. In this book, around page 15, he wrote that these studies about regions associated with a specific function (like sarcasm) are interesting and amusing, but ultimately they don't help you out at all, and ultimately you can't gain anything from it. Not as long as you can't get to those machines and do the feedback (these are my words I'm adding, not his). - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ From spike66 at att.net Sat Jun 21 04:31:06 2008 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:31:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Total State In-Reply-To: <485C41AD.9090009@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <200806210458.m5L4vqGw024146@andromeda.ziaspace.com> ... > > > > David where the heck were you guys when the Texas authorities were > > raiding the FLDS compound? spike > > > We can't cover everything, so sometimes we watch and, if > needed, advise in the background...And of > course we're not perfect, nor in agreement with everyone's > values on every issue. - David C. Harris Thanks for the reply David. I personally am not a supporter of the ACLU as it is operated, but I am a supporter of their charter and stated mission, to defend the bill of rights. That being said, I will offer a defense of the ACLU for not coming to the aid of the YFZers. The bill of rights forbids the government from seizing one's property without due process of law, but it doesn't actually say in there anywhere that the government may not seize one's children, utterly without evidence of a crime. No direct and explicit violation of the bill of rights, therefore the ACLU would have nothing to say in this case. This was a hell of a shocking civics lesson. The fact that this was overlooked or unstated in the bill of rights is appalling to me. The constitution of course long predated the whole notion of a child "protective" service, and so the idea likely never occurred to the founding fathers to add such a clause to forbid take away our children without meticulous rigor and due process of law. If this case is allowed to stand (the Texas CPS officers do not face justice for their crimes) it looks to me as if the constitution allows the state governments to become a tyrannical dictatorships, in complete control of the population, perfectly legally. It allows these governments to control the population by legally abducting their children. All this time we have been worried about abuse of the war powers act, when the *real* time bomb in the constitution was elsewhere and even more insidious. spike From amara at amara.com Sat Jun 21 05:50:52 2008 From: amara at amara.com (Amara Graps) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:50:52 -0600 Subject: [ExI] The Total State Message-ID: Spike: >If this case is allowed to stand (the Texas CPS officers do not face justice >for their crimes) it looks to me as if the constitution allows the state >governments to become a tyrannical dictatorships, in complete control of the >population, perfectly legally. It allows these governments to control the >population by legally abducting their children. Didn't the ACLU represent some of the FLDS mothers? >All this time we have been worried about abuse of the war powers act, when >the *real* time bomb in the constitution was elsewhere and even more >insidious. I wonder if you've read the news in the last 24 hours? The telecoms who cooperated with the NSA in domestic spying are not legally liable for their actions. The House (democrats) not only gave the telecoms immunity, but expanded the NSA's spying powers on Americans. So much for the Constitution's Fourth Amendment. I don't know any more what to think. Governments reflect the people who elect them, so this is what the Americans must want. But all I can see is a horrendous monster growing more out of control by the day. This is not an environment in which I want to raise my child. Amara ---- http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/06/house-grants-te.html "The bill allows the National Security Agency to order phone companies, ISPs and online service providers to turn over all communications that have one foreigner as a party to the conversation. If any Americans are party to the conversation, the government is supposed to mask their names, but these procedures to minimize privacy-invasion are easily overridden. The longstanding Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required specific court orders to wiretap phone and internet lines inside the United States, but did not regulate spying conducted on non-U.S. soil. Under the so-called FISA Amendments Act of 2008, the government would need a court order to wiretap an American overseas, regardless of where the tap was. Under the current regime, targeted taps aimed at Americans overseas requires the sign-off of the attorney general. The nation's telecoms will soon be freed from some 40 lawsuits accusing them of eavesdropping illegally, if the bill is passed into law as expected. The legality of the retroactive amnesty isn't clear, and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation will likely challenge the provision on constitutional grounds." [...] ---- http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/06/house-falls-down House Falls Down on the Job The House of Representatives today has fallen down on the job. By passing the FISA Amendments Act (293-129, with 105 Democrats in favor), they voted to give this lame duck President an undeserved parting gift by passing immunity for telecoms that helped the President violate the Constitution by participating in the NSA's massive and illegal spying program. While Speaker Pelosi and President Bush describe it as a "balanced bill" with "bipartisan support," the millions of Americans whose privacy rights have been violated by the President's illegal spying program seem to have been left out of the equation. Senator Bond's gloating statement to the New York Times showed the true picture: "I think the White House got a better deal than even they had hoped to get." The Washington Post wrote that the bill "hands President Bush one of the last major legislative victories he is likely to achieve." And the San Francisco Chronicle, writing from Speaker Pelosi's home district, called the vote "weak, timid, spineless." To say that EFF is disappointed in the House Leadership's support for this bill is an understatement. Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Hoyer, so vocal in their opposition to telecom immunity last March, capitulated to a dangerous "compromise" that gives the telecoms and the Bush Administration what they have been demanding for over a year: Protection from court cases that threaten to uncover the extent of the President's illegal spying program. Many Democrats stood up for the rule of law, and they deserve our thanks. Senators Conyers and Nadler have been consistent and vocal in their staunch opposition to immunity. Senator Feingold has spoken out as well, saying that the bill "is not a compromise, it is a capitulation." Republican Senator Arlen Specter has shown himself more supportive of the rule of law than Speaker Pelosi on this issue: "I am opposed to the proposed legislation because it does not require a judicial determination that what the telephone companies have done in the past is constitutional. It is totally insufficient to grant immunity for the telephone companies' prior conduct based merely on the written assurance from the administration that the spying was legal." As the fight moves to the Senate, we now look to Senators Leahy, Dodd and Feingold to lead the opposition to the immunity provisions in the Senate version of the bill. Contact your Senators now and tell them to stand strong. ---- http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/35740prs20080620.html House Approves Unconstitutional Surveillance Legislation (6/20/2008) FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: (202) 675-2312 or media at dcaclu.org Washington, DC - Following a vote in the House of Representatives sanctioning warrantless wiretapping and handing immunity to telecommunications companies for their role in domestic spying, the American Civil Liberties Union expressed outrage at representatives who voted for the unconstitutional legislation. The bill, H.R. 6304, or The FISA Amendments Act of 2008, passed the chamber by a vote of 293-129, and is expected to be voted on in the Senate next week. The following may be attributed to Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office: "It's Christmas morning at the White House thanks to this vote. The House just wrapped up some expensive gifts for the administration and their buddies at the phone companies. Watching the House fall to scare tactics and political maneuvering is especially infuriating given the way it stood up to pressure from the president on this same issue just months ago. In March we thought the House leadership had finally grown a backbone by rejecting the Senate's FISA bill. Now we know they will not stand up for the Constitution. "No matter how often the opposition calls this bill a 'compromise,' it is not a meaningful compromise, except of our constitutional rights. The bill allows for mass, untargeted and unwarranted surveillance of all communications coming in to and out of the United States. The courts' role is superficial at best, as the government can continue spying on our communications even after the FISA court has objected. Democratic leaders turned what should have been an easy FISA fix into the wholesale giveaway of our Fourth Amendment rights. "More than two years after the president's domestic spying was revealed in the pages of the New York Times, Congress' fury and shock has dissipated to an obedient whimper. After scrambling for years to cover their tracks, the phone companies and the administration are almost there. This immunity provision will effectively destroy Americans' chance to have their deserved day in court and will kill any possibility of learning the extent of the administration's lawless actions. The House should be ashamed of itself. The fate of the Fourth Amendment is now in the Senate's hands. We can only hope senators will show more courage than their colleagues in the House." From dharris234 at mindspring.com Sat Jun 21 06:53:42 2008 From: dharris234 at mindspring.com (David C. Harris) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:53:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Total State In-Reply-To: <200806210458.m5L4vqGw024146@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <200806210458.m5L4vqGw024146@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <485CA576.2030800@mindspring.com> spike wrote: > ... > > > The bill of rights forbids the government from seizing one's property > without due process of law, but it doesn't actually say in there anywhere > that the government may not seize one's children, utterly without evidence > of a crime. No direct and explicit violation of the bill of rights, > therefore the ACLU would have nothing to say in this case. > > This was a hell of a shocking civics lesson. The fact that this was > overlooked or unstated in the bill of rights is appalling to me. The > constitution of course long predated the whole notion of a child > "protective" service, and so the idea likely never occurred to the founding > fathers to add such a clause to forbid take away our children without > meticulous rigor and due process of law. > > If this case is allowed to stand (the Texas CPS officers do not face justice > for their crimes) it looks to me as if the constitution allows the state > governm