[ExI] Forking

[Kelly Anderson]

On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 12:43 PM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Resources will always be limited.  Forking will on average cost a
> person (or society) half the computation space they had.  So after a
> fork, you run half as fast or are half as smart and half as rich.
> Someone with a madness for forking will soon have no more hardware per
> second than an Apple II.  There may be a lot of you, but at the rate
> they think it hardly matters.

My assumption for the desire of forking is that the human brain (or
possibly anything modeled on the human brain) has only one thread of
top level conscious thought at once. The desire to be in more than one
place at a time, or do more than one thing at a time, seems sufficient
justification for the practice.

Alternatively, if you can figure out how to have multiple threads of
top level conscious thought, then you've solved the same problem in a
different way, and then perhaps it's just semantics.

> I can't think of any economic or intellectual reason that would not be
> served equally well by spinning off a temporary thread that would
> merge back in to the main stem.  As for the Church of the Fork . . . .

There's too many negatives in this sentence for me to be absolutely
sure which way you're leaning here Keith... but forking and subsequent
merging is what I promote.

> The inverse of forking is merging.  That could just as well become a
> competing process or maybe even the dominate one for people who get
> bored but don't want to exactly die.

Meaning merging into some other person's brain? My assumption, again
based upon the design of the current wet brain, is that merging will
(at least initially) only be possible with the brain that originally
forked, because the structure of the neurons would be vastly different
in another brain, but would be relatively similar in the same brain
separated by only short periods of time and minimal learning in that
time. I might use a set of neurons that you use to represent banana to
represent pear... and that would seem to be very confusing after a
merge of your and my brain.

-Kelly