[ExI] Clarification of me and uploading.

[Adrian Tymes]

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 10:29 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> > ...On Behalf Of Alan Grimes
> ...
> >
> > 1. It must be accepted that computronium is not an end in itself...
>
> Clarify please.  Do you mean you can imagine an endgame for the solar
> system
> that is something other than computronium swirling about the sun?  What are
> the alternate endgames?
>

Consider the mass ratio of a computer to the power plant (not battery or
other energy
storage, but energy generation) that powers it.  Might it not be the case
that, even if
optimum computronium becomes available, the majority of the mass might need
to be
devoted to energy harvesting - as in a classic Dyson sphere?

Further, mass is needed to interact with the world.  A computer, by itself
with no
connection to robot limbs or other mechanical controls, can not actually do
anything.
(The most common connection is via delivering instructions to a human being
- but it's
still the human that actually does something.)  Computronium left to swirl
about the sun
is, for example, unable to make more computronium, or recover if an
unforeseen comet
perturbs its orbit and sends it into the sun.

Some amount of computronium is desirable, of course.  But if only that
remains, then the
computronium may as well be broken and inert as far as anything outside of
it is
concerned.


> >
> > 2. It must be accepted that destructive brain uploading is NOT the
> > *ONLY* way to expand your mind using computronium...
>
> OK.  But do let me focus on endgames.
>

If you focus on the endgame, without a coherent path to get there, the
endgame you will
almost certainly wind up with is not the one which you imagine.  Unlike the
Singularity
itself, this has happened before, therefore it can be predicted as likely to
happen again.
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