[ExI] Destructive uploading.

Tue Sep 6 19:51:49 UTC 2011

On Tue, Sep 06, 2011 at 09:37:06AM -0700, Keith Henson wrote:

> > Indeed; and also providing a nice graded progression,
> > sufficiently succicnt even for attention-deficient.
> 
> Call me attention-deficient if you want, but Moravec's description of

I very much doubt you are, attention-deficient are largely the ADHD
people, especially ones that spent most of their lifetime self-training
on the Internet and mobile phones. 

> destructive uploading was just disgusting, with the husk of a body
> going into spasm as the last of the brain was destructively scanned at
> the bottom of a now empty skull.

Moravec's is weird; when I saw him live once answering a question
from the auditorium I got a really strange impression that he would actually
welcome our mind children devouring their parents (in a reversal of Saturn)
or at least be indifferent to the idea, as long as something survives.
I might have pegged him wrong, though.

Moreover, he might have had a case of "if all you had was a bush robot".

It's interesting how he completely disappeared after founding Seegrid
in 2003, apart from a 2008 article in SA. So he either ran out of steam,
or it's exactly the other way round -- he's doing stuff, not publishing.

> My point is that really poor idea (from a marketing viewpoint) *isn't
> needed.*  The same nanotechnology you need for destructive scanning

You don't need full-blown nanotechnology for destructive scanning.
We don't know how much resolution we need, the 1 nm with selective
sampling to functional group level is just an educated guess. 
It could be a lot less, at which point uploading/WBE/ASIM/whateveryoucallitatthemoment
is even easier than I thought. I expect a mouse by end of my
live (some 40-50 years away, hopefully), but it could be actually
faster -- I don't expect to see primate-sized realtime models,
though.

> can be used to infiltrate the brain, initially as a neural interface
> and later teaching a set of nanoprocessors how to act as your
> biological brain would act.  There is no reason memory could not be
> constructed in the biological brain while "you" were in an uploaded
> state making the process completely reversible, even continuous
> consciousness through an upload/download cycle.

Of course an online conversion is vastly preferable. But none of us
currently alive are going to get that, so we have to deal with the
only technology available *currently*, which is solid-state hypothermia.

> The sub set of these discussions of making duplicates is the route to
> abject poverty.

I don't see any major point in duplicating agents verbatim, not outside
of spatial and temporal niches. On the long run Darwin will see that 
efficiency and population sizes increase to the carrying capacity of
our spacetime, given the limited resources of matterenergy and
reachability (assuming inflationary dark energy is true).

> I know Robin Hansen talks about this as inevitable, and it may be that
> economic forces make it come about.  But there are things that really

Economy is a special case of Darwin (hear the sound of economists
bristle). 

> should be forbidden or at least tightly controlled, and this is one of
> them.  If people think about it, and care to have a resource rich
> world, I expect a rule of "one at a time" to be observed.  Sadly they
> probably won't think about it before making duplicates.

Look around. Do you see people giving much thought before producing
children? It is out of control, it stays out of control. Unless you go
through an infinitely narrow population bottleneck, and engineer something
extremely sticky (the mother of all founding effects), which I think isn't
something we can do. Nor should do.

> Keith
> 
> >> I hope that doesn't sound condescending, it's sincerely not meant to be.
> >>
> >> It seems that very few people genuinely grok this concept, you seem to have joined their ranks.  Congratulations on making the transition from Crypto-Dualist to true Materialist!
> >>
> >> A bit scary, but exhilarating, no?
> >
> > Ah, but that rabbit-hole can go a bit further down, still
> > http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list/browse_thread/thread/4c995dee307def3b/9f94f4d49cb2b9e6?pli=1
> > (and similar).
> >
> > With enough drugs, maybe.
> >
> > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ahc1b0Tm7A
> >
> >> Ben Zaiboc
> >
> >
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