[ExI] Life @ Playstation

Sun Nov 4 13:57:37 UTC 2012

Hi Stefano,

Where are you getting all this from?  Especially specifics like "since 
1870"?

All I have is anecdotal evidences, but here's a few things I see that 
seem to say otherwise?

  * Back in the 90's there wasn't even a WTA.  Now the WTA is huge, has
    many chapters and significant activities, and is growing, right?
  * Mormon Transhumanism is certainly growing!  Before 2006, John Grigg
    and I were the only Mormons I knew about.  The MTA really took off
    in 2007, and now there are almost 300 of them.  They have a very
    active board of directors  (I got voted off last year, to many other
    way better than I people) and they know have their annual conference
    which is also growing each year...
  * The average life span continues to go through the roof, despite the
    100 year old DNA limit wall that seems to have been placed in front
    of us.
  * I, as a type 1 juvenile diabetic,  last year, was on the verge of
    needing major laser surgery for my eyes, because the 'bleeders' were
    getting so bad.  (And the eyes mirror what is happening in the rest
    of the nervous and vascular system throughout the body, which can't
    be fixed like the eyes can.) But this year I finally got a "real
    time glucose monitoring system" which has finally given me
    sufficient knowledge about blood sugar levels (still very far from
    perfect) so I can achieve far better blood sugar level controls. 
    Now that I've been on this for almost a year, with way better
    control, my eye doctor says the 'bleeders' in my eyes are now almost
    completely healed and gone.  So I just in time dodged that bullet.
  * My son was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.  Before 5 years
    ago, they had almost nothing that could help him, other than things
    like shock therapy.  Today, there is a mountain of drugs that are
    still crude, and often risky, but life is way better with all that. 
    And the best one he is on now, though VERY $1000/month expensive,
    didn't exist till last year.
  * Everyone thinks the costs of medical care are going up because of
    reasons like efficiency, law suites, insurance companies, and so
    on.  But that is all absurd and mistaken ignorance of the crowd.  I
    work in the medical information efficiency field at 3M Health
    Information Systems, and trust me, the types of  AI and computer
    systems finally starting to help with all that is improving things,
    especially efficiency, and we can do so much more important life
    saving analytics now, by leaps and bounds.  The reason the cost of
    health care is going through the roof, is because there are an
    exponential number of life saving things like data analytics, new
    drugs like the one I mentioned for my son.  New systems like this
    real time glucose monitoring system (the "pump" (i.e. artificial
    pancreas) is more than $8000, and it costs > $1000 / month run.)
    which all didn't exist last year.  I get so angry when hear all the
    political candidates say things we need to "stop the out of control
    price increases" or limit it to inflation or worse.  Which is saying
    to me, they want to stop things like what my son and I just got last
    year!!  We need to have a visionary political leader to tell us the
    real reason health care costs are going up.  The fact that the
    average life span continues to grow, isn't free!!  And it is most
    definitely way more than worth it.  We are all going to be much more
    poorer, spending a significantly increased percentage of what we
    earn in life, on health care, but the significantly increased
    quality of life span is going to be way worth it.  We've got to help
    educate the clueless and immoral crowd on this issue, or we're
    headed for a huge and destructive train wreck on this issue.
  * We're continuing the working on the "Consciousness Survey Project"
    at Canonizer.com - now with people like Dennett, Chalmers, Hameroff,
    Lehar, and so many other contributing world class leaders.  And the
    amount of expert consensus, in this field where everyone things
    there is no consensus at all, is totally shocking.  The only
    remaining disagreement is in the exact relationship between
    phenomenal qualities like redness and greenness, and the underlying
    neural correlates or actual physics that are responsible for such. 
    All the leading theories are making real predictions on just how to
    test for each of them, to the falsification of all others. (forcing
    all experts into one camp)  I'm predicting this discovery of the
    relationship between something like a redness quality, to the
    underlying physics, (and the way it will enable us to do things like
    solve the 'problem of other minds' so that you can know if your
    upload is really you or not, will be the greatest scientific
    discovery of all time.  And the fact that there is so much expert
    consensus in this field, already, shows that we've made way more
    progress than anyone realizes.  The growing consensus is, we're
    finally about to really crack the nut of consciousness, and surely
    that will change the world more dramatically than any other
    scientific achievement to date.

Brent Allsop

On 11/4/2012 6:17 AM, Stefano Vaj wrote:
> But one area where the two issues overlap is a general cultural 
> environment where not only does popular prometheism and futurism seem 
> at an all-time low since 1870, together with investments in, and 
> societal commitment to, fundamental R&D, but expected breakthroughs 
> are delayed or never happen also because of a lack of grand, original, 
> out-of-the-box, lateral-thinking visions in many fields of fundamental 
> science.
>
> --
> Stefano Vaj
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat

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