[ExI] Obama keen on brain mapping

[Alan Grimes]

Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 05, 2013 at 02:49:51PM -0400, Alan Grimes wrote:
>> People who weren't joking have said this to me.

> That's just the point, it takes just one rogue deity
> to ruin your afternoon for good.

Good thing deities only exist in fantasies... ;)

BTW, I'd much prefer a Bad Wolf type deity over a Dalek Emperor deity.

>>> What's the purpose behind the Sixth Great Extinction? None.
>>> It's a side effect of activities of a particular local
>>> primate species. No ill intent whatsoever. The result is still
>>> pretty impressive, and not in a good way.

>> Since then we have extended our sentience and expanded our morality. It

> But what about these who want to be a mushroom? What do you think
> furries are going to do with that funky morphological freedom,
> once they got that? Beware of the full moon! The werewolves
> will be out in full force tonight.

The difference between a warewolf and an uploader is that the warefolf 
feels a twinge of remorse over killing someone while an uploader insists 
that it was for the benefit of his future selves. I have to side with 
the wolves on this one.

>> must be assumed that all actions taken by sentient entities are
>> deliberate and therefore they are morally responsible for them. I have
>> no sympathy for your "forces of history" line of argument.

> Then, when will you start going something against that
> Anthropocene thing? It would be as futile, but it would be
> at least consistent.

Hey! I recycle, walk instead of drive when I can... My lifestyle is 
almost as efficient as it could possibly be

>>So you are assuming that uploads will inevitably use their [highly speculative] speedups


> What is so speculative that you can do in ns or ps what biology does
> in ms?

It's speculative until it happens. Right now we still don't know how 
much Actual Computing goes on in each neuron. All I hear about is AI 
researchers bitching about how their supercomputers aren't fast enough. 
The best AI/neural simulator in the world right now runs at a 3,000x 
slowdown over realtime on a top of the line workstation... How do you 
propose to go from that to a 1000x+ speedup when you, yourself, have 
pointed out how Moore's law is crapping out on us.

On the other hand, for a non-neural/post-neural (non-upload) cognitive 
architecture, we probably already have massive hardware over-hang, to 
the point where we are already well past the $1/IQ point line.

>> in such ways, out of carelessness or malice, to quickly impose severe changes on free, sentient, human beings who are not uploaded?

> Why did they turn the jungle into a parking lot, and what did
> the gorillas do about that?

For my side of the thread I will refer to humanoid lifeforms as savants, 
artists, and spiritually enlightened. Uploads will be invariably be 
exact copies of simians and even lower forms of life such as spamers... 
(my old e-mail address is getting spammed 400x a week now...) Hey! I 
didn't bring spamming into this thread or even connect the practice with 
uploads!

As to your point, it is generally accepted that humans are usually 
sentient while gorillas possess only the faintest flickers of sentience.

>> morphological freedom and the right of all sentient beings to go on
>> living?

> Of course I do, but what about all the other clades?

Well then, in those cases we will need a governing mechanism to protect 
the innocent as such vicious clades, inevitably, go extinct.

>>> I have no idea what you're talking about.

>> I mean that if some randomly selected Amish person neglected to read the
>> news paper, he would never know anything about it. I mean that if I set

> I can assure you even uncontacted tribes will know about it.
> Nobody can spam like the gods.

d0G ain't no spammer. (he leaves that to his evangelists.) From my point 
of view, anything that spams cannot possibly be a god. Your conception 
of the divine seems to be at least four or five orders of magnitude 
inferior to what I think of when I think of infinite being. I ph34r it 
is dangerous to hold such a weak conception of the divine because it 
leaves you blind to the possibility of something that much more powerful 
than anything you had previously conceived. So anything less than the 
ragged limits of what could plausibly be contemplated should not be 
labeled god or anything more than a being with specific, limited 
enhancements.

>> up a mail filter to block all messages from uploaded people, then I
>> would be free to chart my life course in any way my deviant little heart
>> could desire without ever being affected by them.

> Gorillas are unfortunately affected by logging, and cannot
> live in parking lots. They're probably not happy about that.

So exactly how many trees do you need to cut down?

  >> How is uploading not perfectly orthogonal to the energy crisis?

> The energy cliff was a metaphor illustrating that collectively
> the humanity is out of control and routinely doing some pretty
> boneheaded things, like destroying their own life support.
> Just because it's called Anthropocene it doesn't mean we're
> exempt from the Great Dying.

Yeah, that's an economic problem, not an uploading problem.

>> What is the relationship between uploading and the solar constant?

> Because the solar output is finite, and pretty soon we'll need all of
> it.

For what?
Why?

>> So super fast, if not super-intelligent uploaded minds will wipe us all out because, collectively, they are intellectually equivalent to a slime mold?

> Why do you think everybody will be super-intelligent? What about super-stupid,
> super-tiny, super-fast? Diseases kill more people than sharks do.

How do you plan to survive, even as an upload, with such tiny-nasties 
running around?

>>> Has your mortality ever offered you a dialog, and a compromise, perhaps?

>> How about this compromise:  You go upload and leave me alone -- forever.

> I can promise you that (I personally think mountain gorillas are cool,
> and should be around indefinitely), but don't hold that against me if somebody
> else accidently drops the piano on your head from the helicopter
> or some primitive postlifeform eats you inadvertedly.

>> What other compromise do you suggest?

> I'd try to become less attached to the stupid mansuit you're wearing.

Well, I am in the market for a new and improved meat-puppet.

But that doesn't sound like much of a compromise though.

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