[ExI] YES! Hard-core transhumanist splinter groups yearning for cyber-heaven

[Gregory Jones]

--- On Wed, 6/16/10, samantha <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:




Gregory Jones wrote: 







--- On Wed, 6/16/10, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
 
>...every atom and every photon somehow participating in the activity of thinking and creating.
 

> Is thinking and creating all there is?...
 
Ja!
 
>  Is it enough for you to be happy?...
 
Thinking and creating makes me happy.  The computronium would think about ways to be happy, and create new ways to be happy and have fun.  Compare the world we have now to the one that was 300 years ago.  Why is it so much better now?  Because we have information, we have so many cool things that the old ones didn't have.
 
>   Why involve every atom and photon?
 
I see no point in wasting them.  I don't like to see things dead.  I want everything alive, as alive as it can be, thinking, playing, creating fun!  Life is good, fun is good, so more of it is better, and as much as can be had is best.
 
 >  That seems rather pointlessly absolutist to me...
 
It seems rather pointfully absolutist to me.  {8-]
 
>   And it will never ever happen anyway without breaking the speed of light barrier...
 
Hmm, I don't propose anything illegal.  Obeying the known natural laws, my endgame vision is using everything we have to maximize sentience.
 
 
>   What about the 96% of all that is that isn't atoms and photons?  - s

We lose that.  For now.  Unless or until all that computronium figures out how to make use of it to create more computronium, in which case the fun is multiplied by a factor of 25.
 
Look at it this way.  If we consider all the real thinking going on in this solar system is happening in the minds of humans, and there are about 6e9 of us now, and on average we are about 70 kg each, that's about 4e11 kg participating in human level sentience.  The mass of the earth is about 6e24 kg, so less than 1 part in 10^13, less than a tenth of a part per trillion is really having fun, and there is probably about another couple orders of magnitude of metals in the solar system outside of earth, so one part in a quadrillion in the solar system is participating in human thought.
 
Most of the sunlight that falls on the earth is wasted, but lets ignore that painful fact for very conservative estimates.  The radius of the earth is about 6400 km, so area of an earth sized disc is about 1.3e8 km^2, and out here at 8 light minutes, the area of a sphere of that radius would be about 2.8e17, so about 1 photon in every 2^e9, less than half a part per billion emitted by the sun, ever hits the earth.
 
So what if we could increase our energy use by 2 billion and our amount of matter participating in thought by 10 trillion?  Wouldn't we have fun with that?  Wouldn't that be like having 10 trillion Anders Sandbergs, 10 teraAmaras, 10 teraMax?  Oh my, would that sim whoop ass, or what? 
 
And even that scenario vastly underestimates the case, because the mass of a human is appallingly underutilized in thinking and enjoying.  Some of our mass is just hair, nails, flab, stuff we don't need.  Most of our mass is stuff we don't need, or wouldn't need if we were not preoccupied with feeding ourselves to maintain tissue that we don't need.  If we put everything to work, progress could proceed jillions of times faster, better, cheaper.  We could figure out ways to go get that other 96% and all the rest of the galaxy, and all the other galaxies too, for there is no point in wasting all that energy, just shining out into cold dead empty space.
 
This is my transhuman endgame vision, the vision that guides everything I do, everything I think, everything I am and hope to become.
 
spike
 
 
 
 
 
 
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