[ExI] a fun brain in which to live

[spike]

... On Behalf Of Brent Allsop
Subject: Re: [ExI] a fun brain in which to live

...

>...Spike, I just have one question.  Do you ever think of uploading?  Or of
having your mind being run on another computer?...


Of course, all the time.  In the long run, I see that as the only reasonable
future of mankind.  Eventually in some form, software will write software,
and the result will be recursive self-improvement, and my fond hope is that
the result will want to upload us.  I am one who is convinced that
consciousness is not strictly substrate dependent.  Once we exist as
software, the things we can do with our brains will be astonishing in
variety.

An example is one I brought up before.  I want to be able to view the world,
at least temporarily, through female eyes.  That would allow me to
understand the things women think, and that would make me a better husband.
Some things I just utterly fail to understand, starting with what in the
heck to women see in us? 

>...Obviously, there is the stuff going on in your mind, and there is the
stuff going on in my mind, and with the uploaded mind, there would be the
stuff going on in that mind also...

Imagine that we can unify two or more different brains, and have a being
that is the superset of each individual.  Then you might choose a person who
is wildly different from you, with which to temporarily unify.  I don't know
what happens when people merge their consciousness, but we can't do it now.
We might be able to in the uploaded condition.

>...Sure, all this behavior could be modeled by equations, but how do you
glue it all together, in a phenomenal way, so you know what it is all
phenomenally like?  

I don't know.  I want a shot at it, which is why I am probably going to go
in for cryonics.  I actually don't think the singularity will happen in 30
years (it might) but rather about 50, at which time I would be 100.  I might
not make it that far.

>...If you are interested in imagining what uploading, and the future is
going to be like, is not this kind of stuff one of the most important
parts?...but till you eff them, and share them, we'll never really know what
they are like...Brent Allsop

Ja.  I still just don't know with so much of this.  I will sadly confess
that fifteen years ago I thought we would be farther along by now than we
are.  But the singularity is still coming eventually, and when it does, I
can imagine no logical stopping place for it short of all the metals in the
solar system converted to computronium to form an MBrain, with humans
uploaded.

spike