From bronto at pobox.com Sat May 3 05:52:24 2025 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Fri, 2 May 2025 22:52:24 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Riddle? In-Reply-To: References: <8eaf4ef8f653beebfbfb72a48a3e8456@sollegro.com> <90bcf0d1-048a-4583-814d-94ff32de6661@pobox.com> Message-ID: <3439a897-a694-4eb0-ba4d-9294bea5bbcf@pobox.com> On 2025-04-27 21:58, Darin Sunley wrote: > Or if we think about countries in Africa that are west of Spain, like > Morocco, but as I said, Morocco is southwest, and its last letter is > "O," not "L." Some of Morocco is due west of Ceuta or Melilla, Spanish cities. -- *\\* Anton Sherwood *\\* www.bendwavy.org From pharos at gmail.com Sat May 3 16:14:48 2025 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 3 May 2025 17:14:48 +0100 Subject: [ExI] New fusion rocket design could cut Mars trip to under 4 months Message-ID: New fusion rocket design could cut Mars trip to under 4 months By David Szondy May 03, 2025 Quotes: Called Sunbird, we now have more details on the nuclear fusion rocket project that is so far along that the company expects to demonstrate it later this year and begin orbital tests in 2027. "I expect that, as of today, Sunbird is already being closely analyzed by our global competitors," said Dinan. "Pulsar has built a reputation for delivering real technology ? not just concepts. We have recently commissioned not one, but two of the largest space propulsion testing chambers in the UK, if not all of Europe. Pulsar is now an international space propulsion testing powerhouse, and we have ambitious plans to expand rapidly. We actively welcome visits from appropriate partners and prospective international clients and look forward to sharing more exciting developments we have in the pipeline." -------------------- Note the words "If they can get it to work". But it sounds like a big advance. BillK From avant at sollegro.com Sat May 3 17:48:54 2025 From: avant at sollegro.com (Stuart LaForge) Date: Sat, 03 May 2025 10:48:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] New fusion rocket design could cut Mars trip to under 4 months In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 2025-05-03 09:14, BillK via extropy-chat wrote: > New fusion rocket design could cut Mars trip to under 4 months > By David Szondy May 03, 2025 > > > Quotes: > Called Sunbird, we now have more details on the nuclear fusion rocket > project that is so far along that the company expects to demonstrate > it later this year and begin orbital tests in 2027. > > "I expect that, as of today, Sunbird is already being closely analyzed > by our global competitors," said Dinan. "Pulsar has built a reputation > for delivering real technology ? not just concepts. We have recently > commissioned not one, but two of the largest space propulsion testing > chambers in the UK, if not all of Europe. Pulsar is now an > international space propulsion testing powerhouse, and we have > ambitious plans to expand rapidly. We actively welcome visits from > appropriate partners and prospective international clients and look > forward to sharing more exciting developments we have in the > pipeline." > -------------------- I like it. Their fusion reaction is D +3 He ? 4He(3.6MeV) + p+ (14.7MeV). Deuterium fuel is easy to come by on Earth but Helium 3 is not. However it is abundant on the moon. This engine design might be the killer app that gives economic value to colonizing and mining the moon. I think it is way cool. Stuart LaForge From avant at sollegro.com Sat May 3 19:08:02 2025 From: avant at sollegro.com (Stuart LaForge) Date: Sat, 03 May 2025 12:08:02 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Problem of Mental Causation In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 2025-04-30 10:17, Jason Resch via extropy-chat wrote: > One of the great puzzles when it comes to understanding consciousness > and its role in the universe is the question of how conscious thoughts > could have any causal power in a universe fully governed and > determined by particles blindly following forces of nature. Thinking and information processing, conscious or otherwise, has casual power through its information content. This is a direct application of the Laundauer's principle. Mental causation is exactly how Maxwell's Demon works. It uses it knowledge of the positions and momentum of all the individual particles of gas to create a temperature gradient. Maxwell's Demon seems to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics by decreasing the entropy of the gas. But, this is not the case, because in the process of memorizing the positions and momenta of every particle in the gas and enabling it to increase the system's potential energy, the Demon increased the entropy or information content of its own brain or data storage. This could only have been done by erasing whatever information was there before and incurring some minimal energy cost given by the Landauer principle E >= k * T * ln2 with k being the Boltzmann constant and T being Kelven temperature. Basically the causal power of wanting ice cream is the energy cost it takes to forget you want ice cream either by distracting yourself or by getting yourself the ice cream. > > Some solve this problem by supposing our will must somehow > miraculously intervene in physics. Others solve this problem by > denying human will or agency, relegating consciousness to an > ineffectual, and inessential "epiphenomenon." Our will directly intervenes in physics, not miraculously, but through the mathematical connection between information, entropy, and energy. We are giant Maxwell's demons made possible by smaller Maxwell's demons called cells, which are made possible by smaller Maxwell's demons called mitochondria, and so forth all the way down. > But I think a more nuanced view can show that consciousness can have > causal power in a universe fully determined by particles following > physical equations. Here is my attempt at describing such a view: > https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qCuCc9kvbw5KKHJ223l7MbbNhZkTamhA/view?usp=sharing > An answer to this question is relevant to whether uploaded minds, AI, > or robots can have will or agency, despite their behavior being fully > determined by low-level machine code. Yes, but while consciousness or agency are examples of downward causation or what you call strange loops, these causal loops are far more general of a phenomenon than consciousness or agency. For example subatomic particles give rise to atoms in a standard upward causation, but atoms also give rise to subatomic particles through radioactive decay which is downward causation. Another example would be the surface tension of a water droplet ordering the water molecules into a perfect sphere. Strange loops are not magic, they are physics incorporating information theory. Stuart LaForge From jasonresch at gmail.com Sun May 4 13:38:00 2025 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Sun, 4 May 2025 09:38:00 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Problem of Mental Causation In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Stuart, I was hoping you would have something deep and insightful to add, you don't disappoint! On Sat, May 3, 2025, 3:09 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On 2025-04-30 10:17, Jason Resch via extropy-chat wrote: > > One of the great puzzles when it comes to understanding consciousness > > and its role in the universe is the question of how conscious thoughts > > could have any causal power in a universe fully governed and > > determined by particles blindly following forces of nature. > > Thinking and information processing, conscious or otherwise, has casual > power through its information content. This is a direct application of > the Laundauer's principle. Mental causation is exactly how Maxwell's > Demon works. It uses it knowledge of the positions and momentum of all > the individual particles of gas to create a temperature gradient. > Maxwell's Demon seems to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics by > decreasing the entropy of the gas. But, this is not the case, because in > the process of memorizing the positions and momenta of every particle in > the gas and enabling it to increase the system's potential energy, the > Demon increased the entropy or information content of its own brain or > data storage. This could only have been done by erasing whatever > information was there before and incurring some minimal energy cost > given by the Landauer principle E >= k * T * ln2 with k being the > Boltzmann constant and T being Kelven temperature. > To be clear, are you equating the causal potency of information, with it's necessary generation/storage always incurring a cost of increasing entropy elsewhere? Or is this just one example of how information (or it's processing) can have physical effects? The process that analyzes an approaching gas molecule, judging it's temperature and trajectory, and ultimately deciding whether to open or close the door could itself be viewed as a kind of primitively aware (conscious) thing. It's discriminated high-level information state then occupy a spot in the causal chain, without it, the door could not respond intelligently to it's environment. And I would say the discriminated high-level information state is its conscious state. > Basically the causal power of wanting ice cream is the energy cost it > takes to forget you want ice cream either by distracting yourself or by > getting yourself the ice cream. > Would this mean a conscious mind running on a reversible computer (which escapes Landauer's principle) could have (or allay) no desires? > > > > Some solve this problem by supposing our will must somehow > > miraculously intervene in physics. Others solve this problem by > > denying human will or agency, relegating consciousness to an > > ineffectual, and inessential "epiphenomenon." > > Our will directly intervenes in physics, not miraculously, but through > the mathematical connection between information, entropy, and energy. We > are giant Maxwell's demons made possible by smaller Maxwell's demons > called cells, which are made possible by smaller Maxwell's demons called > mitochondria, and so forth all the way down. > I agree there are many levels of organization all of which can possess their own upwards and downwards causal forces. > > But I think a more nuanced view can show that consciousness can have > > causal power in a universe fully determined by particles following > > physical equations. Here is my attempt at describing such a view: > > > > https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qCuCc9kvbw5KKHJ223l7MbbNhZkTamhA/view?usp=sharing > > An answer to this question is relevant to whether uploaded minds, AI, > > or robots can have will or agency, despite their behavior being fully > > determined by low-level machine code. > > Yes, but while consciousness or agency are examples of downward > causation or what you call strange loops, these causal loops are far > more general of a phenomenon than consciousness or agency. I agree with this. Consciousness is by no means unique in expressing downwards causation. I give the example of a nerve cell ordering neurotransmitter molecules around. For example > subatomic particles give rise to atoms in a standard upward causation, > but atoms also give rise to subatomic particles through radioactive > decay which is downward causation. Another example would be the surface > tension of a water droplet ordering the water molecules into a perfect > sphere. Strange loops are not magic, they are physics incorporating > information theory. > Sperry gave the example of a tire rolling down a hill. The tire is made of molecules, but the rolling of the tire largely guides the motions of all the atoms in the tire. I guess the question then becomes what kinds of information processing activities are conscious ones. You make the comparison to erasing or overwriting information, but is any process of recording information conscious? And what of processing information without overwriting or erasing? Are such processes not conscious? I think the dividing line for consciousness may be something other than entropy increasing operations. I agree that information processing, consciousness, and entropy are all closely related, but are they equal? Jason -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sun May 4 15:28:42 2025 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sun, 4 May 2025 10:28:42 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The Problem of Mental Causation In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: All processing of information starts in the unconscious (obvious if you follow the stimuli through the brain centers before it reaches the forebrain). Thus, thoughts and actions come from the unconscious. The conscious gets a veto power, (if it is very quick - if it isn't, we do and say things we regret), but that's about all. I assume this is inconsistent with how an AI operates. Have you read "Thinking Fast and Slow"??? Why not? bill w On Sun, May 4, 2025 at 8:40?AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Stuart, > > I was hoping you would have something deep and insightful to add, you > don't disappoint! > > On Sat, May 3, 2025, 3:09 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> On 2025-04-30 10:17, Jason Resch via extropy-chat wrote: >> > One of the great puzzles when it comes to understanding consciousness >> > and its role in the universe is the question of how conscious thoughts >> > could have any causal power in a universe fully governed and >> > determined by particles blindly following forces of nature. >> >> Thinking and information processing, conscious or otherwise, has casual >> power through its information content. This is a direct application of >> the Laundauer's principle. Mental causation is exactly how Maxwell's >> Demon works. It uses it knowledge of the positions and momentum of all >> the individual particles of gas to create a temperature gradient. >> Maxwell's Demon seems to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics by >> decreasing the entropy of the gas. But, this is not the case, because in >> the process of memorizing the positions and momenta of every particle in >> the gas and enabling it to increase the system's potential energy, the >> Demon increased the entropy or information content of its own brain or >> data storage. This could only have been done by erasing whatever >> information was there before and incurring some minimal energy cost >> given by the Landauer principle E >= k * T * ln2 with k being the >> Boltzmann constant and T being Kelven temperature. >> > > To be clear, are you equating the causal potency of information, with it's > necessary generation/storage always incurring a cost of increasing entropy > elsewhere? Or is this just one example of how information (or it's > processing) can have physical effects? > > The process that analyzes an approaching gas molecule, judging it's > temperature and trajectory, and ultimately deciding whether to open or > close the door could itself be viewed as a kind of primitively aware > (conscious) thing. It's discriminated high-level information state then > occupy a spot in the causal chain, without it, the door could not respond > intelligently to it's environment. And I would say the discriminated > high-level information state is its conscious state. > > > >> Basically the causal power of wanting ice cream is the energy cost it >> takes to forget you want ice cream either by distracting yourself or by >> getting yourself the ice cream. >> > > Would this mean a conscious mind running on a reversible computer (which > escapes Landauer's principle) could have (or allay) no desires? > > >> > >> > Some solve this problem by supposing our will must somehow >> > miraculously intervene in physics. Others solve this problem by >> > denying human will or agency, relegating consciousness to an >> > ineffectual, and inessential "epiphenomenon." >> >> Our will directly intervenes in physics, not miraculously, but through >> the mathematical connection between information, entropy, and energy. We >> are giant Maxwell's demons made possible by smaller Maxwell's demons >> called cells, which are made possible by smaller Maxwell's demons called >> mitochondria, and so forth all the way down. >> > > I agree there are many levels of organization all of which can possess > their own upwards and downwards causal forces. > > >> > But I think a more nuanced view can show that consciousness can have >> > causal power in a universe fully determined by particles following >> > physical equations. Here is my attempt at describing such a view: >> >> > >> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qCuCc9kvbw5KKHJ223l7MbbNhZkTamhA/view?usp=sharing >> > An answer to this question is relevant to whether uploaded minds, AI, >> > or robots can have will or agency, despite their behavior being fully >> > determined by low-level machine code. >> >> Yes, but while consciousness or agency are examples of downward >> causation or what you call strange loops, these causal loops are far >> more general of a phenomenon than consciousness or agency. > > > I agree with this. Consciousness is by no means unique in expressing > downwards causation. I give the example of a nerve cell ordering > neurotransmitter molecules around. > > > For example >> subatomic particles give rise to atoms in a standard upward causation, >> but atoms also give rise to subatomic particles through radioactive >> decay which is downward causation. Another example would be the surface >> tension of a water droplet ordering the water molecules into a perfect >> sphere. Strange loops are not magic, they are physics incorporating >> information theory. >> > > Sperry gave the example of a tire rolling down a hill. The tire is made of > molecules, but the rolling of the tire largely guides the motions of all > the atoms in the tire. > > I guess the question then becomes what kinds of information processing > activities are conscious ones. > > You make the comparison to erasing or overwriting information, but is any > process of recording information conscious? And what of processing > information without overwriting or erasing? Are such processes not > conscious? I think the dividing line for consciousness may be something > other than entropy increasing operations. I agree that information > processing, consciousness, and entropy are all closely related, but are > they equal? > > Jason > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jasonresch at gmail.com Sun May 4 16:44:48 2025 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Sun, 4 May 2025 12:44:48 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Problem of Mental Causation In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, May 4, 2025, 11:30 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > All processing of information starts in the unconscious (obvious if you > follow the stimuli through the brain centers before it reaches the > forebrain). Thus, thoughts and actions come from the unconscious. > Another interpretation is that the computations involved in realizing a conscious state may be distributed across time and space. So even if brain activity precedes a conscious thought in time, it may still be part of the conscious state. Consider a function on a computer that multiplies two million digit numbers. The conscious state may be viewed as the function evaluation itself. Though the physical realization of this function by the computer's processor is spread out over time through many individual operations processing 64 bits at a time. An alien looking at this system might say all the antecedent computation by the processor is unconscious, when really it is just all part of one larger function. Now if the function is conscious we would have the same picture. And we might ask, why certain neural activity seems conscious while other neural activity does not, but this is an illusion created by the fact that one large computations can be spread out across spacetime (a large computations never occurs at a single spacetime point). Another interpretation is that unconscious thoughts are independently conscious. The fact that they inhabit the same skull is not enough justification to logically imply that the consciousness you identify yourself would necessarily be aware of other conscious parts. We see evidence of this in split brains, where two conscious minds inhabit the same skull. One can also consider something like the China brain thought experiment, where individual conscious humans act as neurons in one larger brain. The larger brain doesn't and can't be aware of the individual conscious parts that compose it. The conscious gets a veto power, (if it is very quick - if it isn't, we > do and say things we regret), but that's about all. I assume this is > inconsistent with how an AI operates. > I think there's actually a surprising overlap between how humans seem to think and how these LLMs seem to think. > Have you read "Thinking Fast and Slow"??? Why not? bill w > I haven't but it sounds quite good! Jason > > On Sun, May 4, 2025 at 8:40?AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> Stuart, >> >> I was hoping you would have something deep and insightful to add, you >> don't disappoint! >> >> On Sat, May 3, 2025, 3:09 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> On 2025-04-30 10:17, Jason Resch via extropy-chat wrote: >>> > One of the great puzzles when it comes to understanding consciousness >>> > and its role in the universe is the question of how conscious thoughts >>> > could have any causal power in a universe fully governed and >>> > determined by particles blindly following forces of nature. >>> >>> Thinking and information processing, conscious or otherwise, has casual >>> power through its information content. This is a direct application of >>> the Laundauer's principle. Mental causation is exactly how Maxwell's >>> Demon works. It uses it knowledge of the positions and momentum of all >>> the individual particles of gas to create a temperature gradient. >>> Maxwell's Demon seems to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics by >>> decreasing the entropy of the gas. But, this is not the case, because in >>> the process of memorizing the positions and momenta of every particle in >>> the gas and enabling it to increase the system's potential energy, the >>> Demon increased the entropy or information content of its own brain or >>> data storage. This could only have been done by erasing whatever >>> information was there before and incurring some minimal energy cost >>> given by the Landauer principle E >= k * T * ln2 with k being the >>> Boltzmann constant and T being Kelven temperature. >>> >> >> To be clear, are you equating the causal potency of information, with >> it's necessary generation/storage always incurring a cost of increasing >> entropy elsewhere? Or is this just one example of how information (or it's >> processing) can have physical effects? >> >> The process that analyzes an approaching gas molecule, judging it's >> temperature and trajectory, and ultimately deciding whether to open or >> close the door could itself be viewed as a kind of primitively aware >> (conscious) thing. It's discriminated high-level information state then >> occupy a spot in the causal chain, without it, the door could not respond >> intelligently to it's environment. And I would say the discriminated >> high-level information state is its conscious state. >> >> >> >>> Basically the causal power of wanting ice cream is the energy cost it >>> takes to forget you want ice cream either by distracting yourself or by >>> getting yourself the ice cream. >>> >> >> Would this mean a conscious mind running on a reversible computer (which >> escapes Landauer's principle) could have (or allay) no desires? >> >> >>> > >>> > Some solve this problem by supposing our will must somehow >>> > miraculously intervene in physics. Others solve this problem by >>> > denying human will or agency, relegating consciousness to an >>> > ineffectual, and inessential "epiphenomenon." >>> >>> Our will directly intervenes in physics, not miraculously, but through >>> the mathematical connection between information, entropy, and energy. We >>> are giant Maxwell's demons made possible by smaller Maxwell's demons >>> called cells, which are made possible by smaller Maxwell's demons called >>> mitochondria, and so forth all the way down. >>> >> >> I agree there are many levels of organization all of which can possess >> their own upwards and downwards causal forces. >> >> >>> > But I think a more nuanced view can show that consciousness can have >>> > causal power in a universe fully determined by particles following >>> > physical equations. Here is my attempt at describing such a view: >>> >>> > >>> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qCuCc9kvbw5KKHJ223l7MbbNhZkTamhA/view?usp=sharing >>> > An answer to this question is relevant to whether uploaded minds, AI, >>> > or robots can have will or agency, despite their behavior being fully >>> > determined by low-level machine code. >>> >>> Yes, but while consciousness or agency are examples of downward >>> causation or what you call strange loops, these causal loops are far >>> more general of a phenomenon than consciousness or agency. >> >> >> I agree with this. Consciousness is by no means unique in expressing >> downwards causation. I give the example of a nerve cell ordering >> neurotransmitter molecules around. >> >> >> For example >>> subatomic particles give rise to atoms in a standard upward causation, >>> but atoms also give rise to subatomic particles through radioactive >>> decay which is downward causation. Another example would be the surface >>> tension of a water droplet ordering the water molecules into a perfect >>> sphere. Strange loops are not magic, they are physics incorporating >>> information theory. >>> >> >> Sperry gave the example of a tire rolling down a hill. The tire is made >> of molecules, but the rolling of the tire largely guides the motions of all >> the atoms in the tire. >> >> I guess the question then becomes what kinds of information processing >> activities are conscious ones. >> >> You make the comparison to erasing or overwriting information, but is any >> process of recording information conscious? And what of processing >> information without overwriting or erasing? Are such processes not >> conscious? I think the dividing line for consciousness may be something >> other than entropy increasing operations. I agree that information >> processing, consciousness, and entropy are all closely related, but are >> they equal? >> >> Jason >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ben at zaiboc.net Sun May 4 17:22:21 2025 From: ben at zaiboc.net (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Sun, 4 May 2025 18:22:21 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Problem of Mental Causation In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 04/05/2025 14:38, Jason Resch asked: > One of the great puzzles when it comes to understanding consciousness > and its role in the universe is the question of how conscious thoughts > could have any causal power in a universe fully governed and determined > by particles blindly?following forces of nature. How do shadows on the wall cause solid objects to intercept beams of light? Just because we can string words into sentences doesn't mean the sentences have to mean something. Some 'problems' aren't problems at all, just a lack of understanding how things work. -- Ben -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sun May 4 20:17:58 2025 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sun, 4 May 2025 15:17:58 -0500 Subject: [ExI] The Problem of Mental Causation In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Another interpretation is that unconscious thoughts are independently conscious. This is the one I prefer. Coming up from the spinal cord, say, stimuli activate receptors that relate the input to memory, to emotions, and so on. These lower centers have to be conscious in some sense to interpret those stimuli and apply the proper memory and emotion. However,we cannot access these with our ordinary conscious mind. Only their end product. But this way we have two conscious minds. The conscious mind is accessible to the unconscious, (like the conscience watching over us), but not the reverse (contrary to Freud). 'Thinking Fast and Slow" would have won a Nobel Prize if there were a category for it. Most important book in psychology in many years. bill w On Sun, May 4, 2025 at 11:47?AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > > > On Sun, May 4, 2025, 11:30 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat < > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > >> All processing of information starts in the unconscious (obvious if you >> follow the stimuli through the brain centers before it reaches the >> forebrain). Thus, thoughts and actions come from the unconscious. >> > > Another interpretation is that the computations involved in realizing a > conscious state may be distributed across time and space. So even if brain > activity precedes a conscious thought in time, it may still be part of the > conscious state. > > Consider a function on a computer that multiplies two million digit > numbers. The conscious state may be viewed as the function evaluation > itself. Though the physical realization of this function by the computer's > processor is spread out over time through many individual operations > processing 64 bits at a time. An alien looking at this system might say all > the antecedent computation by the processor is unconscious, when really it > is just all part of one larger function. > > Now if the function is conscious we would have the same picture. And we > might ask, why certain neural activity seems conscious while other neural > activity does not, but this is an illusion created by the fact that one > large computations can be spread out across spacetime (a large computations > never occurs at a single spacetime point). > > Another interpretation is that unconscious thoughts are independently > conscious. The fact that they inhabit the same skull is not enough > justification to logically imply that the consciousness you identify > yourself would necessarily be aware of other conscious parts. We see > evidence of this in split brains, where two conscious minds inhabit the > same skull. > > One can also consider something like the China brain thought experiment, > where individual conscious humans act as neurons in one larger brain. The > larger brain doesn't and can't be aware of the individual conscious parts > that compose it. > > > > The conscious gets a veto power, (if it is very quick - if it isn't, we >> do and say things we regret), but that's about all. I assume this is >> inconsistent with how an AI operates. >> > > I think there's actually a surprising overlap between how humans seem to > think and how these LLMs seem to think. > > >> Have you read "Thinking Fast and Slow"??? Why not? bill w >> > > I haven't but it sounds quite good! > > Jason > > > >> >> On Sun, May 4, 2025 at 8:40?AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat < >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >> >>> Stuart, >>> >>> I was hoping you would have something deep and insightful to add, you >>> don't disappoint! >>> >>> On Sat, May 3, 2025, 3:09 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat < >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: >>> >>>> On 2025-04-30 10:17, Jason Resch via extropy-chat wrote: >>>> > One of the great puzzles when it comes to understanding consciousness >>>> > and its role in the universe is the question of how conscious thoughts >>>> > could have any causal power in a universe fully governed and >>>> > determined by particles blindly following forces of nature. >>>> >>>> Thinking and information processing, conscious or otherwise, has casual >>>> power through its information content. This is a direct application of >>>> the Laundauer's principle. Mental causation is exactly how Maxwell's >>>> Demon works. It uses it knowledge of the positions and momentum of all >>>> the individual particles of gas to create a temperature gradient. >>>> Maxwell's Demon seems to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics by >>>> decreasing the entropy of the gas. But, this is not the case, because >>>> in >>>> the process of memorizing the positions and momenta of every particle >>>> in >>>> the gas and enabling it to increase the system's potential energy, the >>>> Demon increased the entropy or information content of its own brain or >>>> data storage. This could only have been done by erasing whatever >>>> information was there before and incurring some minimal energy cost >>>> given by the Landauer principle E >= k * T * ln2 with k being the >>>> Boltzmann constant and T being Kelven temperature. >>>> >>> >>> To be clear, are you equating the causal potency of information, with >>> it's necessary generation/storage always incurring a cost of increasing >>> entropy elsewhere? Or is this just one example of how information (or it's >>> processing) can have physical effects? >>> >>> The process that analyzes an approaching gas molecule, judging it's >>> temperature and trajectory, and ultimately deciding whether to open or >>> close the door could itself be viewed as a kind of primitively aware >>> (conscious) thing. It's discriminated high-level information state then >>> occupy a spot in the causal chain, without it, the door could not respond >>> intelligently to it's environment. And I would say the discriminated >>> high-level information state is its conscious state. >>> >>> >>> >>>> Basically the causal power of wanting ice cream is the energy cost it >>>> takes to forget you want ice cream either by distracting yourself or by >>>> getting yourself the ice cream. >>>> >>> >>> Would this mean a conscious mind running on a reversible computer (which >>> escapes Landauer's principle) could have (or allay) no desires? >>> >>> >>>> > >>>> > Some solve this problem by supposing our will must somehow >>>> > miraculously intervene in physics. Others solve this problem by >>>> > denying human will or agency, relegating consciousness to an >>>> > ineffectual, and inessential "epiphenomenon." >>>> >>>> Our will directly intervenes in physics, not miraculously, but through >>>> the mathematical connection between information, entropy, and energy. >>>> We >>>> are giant Maxwell's demons made possible by smaller Maxwell's demons >>>> called cells, which are made possible by smaller Maxwell's demons >>>> called >>>> mitochondria, and so forth all the way down. >>>> >>> >>> I agree there are many levels of organization all of which can possess >>> their own upwards and downwards causal forces. >>> >>> >>>> > But I think a more nuanced view can show that consciousness can have >>>> > causal power in a universe fully determined by particles following >>>> > physical equations. Here is my attempt at describing such a view: >>>> >>>> > >>>> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qCuCc9kvbw5KKHJ223l7MbbNhZkTamhA/view?usp=sharing >>>> > An answer to this question is relevant to whether uploaded minds, AI, >>>> > or robots can have will or agency, despite their behavior being fully >>>> > determined by low-level machine code. >>>> >>>> Yes, but while consciousness or agency are examples of downward >>>> causation or what you call strange loops, these causal loops are far >>>> more general of a phenomenon than consciousness or agency. >>> >>> >>> I agree with this. Consciousness is by no means unique in expressing >>> downwards causation. I give the example of a nerve cell ordering >>> neurotransmitter molecules around. >>> >>> >>> For example >>>> subatomic particles give rise to atoms in a standard upward causation, >>>> but atoms also give rise to subatomic particles through radioactive >>>> decay which is downward causation. Another example would be the surface >>>> tension of a water droplet ordering the water molecules into a perfect >>>> sphere. Strange loops are not magic, they are physics incorporating >>>> information theory. >>>> >>> >>> Sperry gave the example of a tire rolling down a hill. The tire is made >>> of molecules, but the rolling of the tire largely guides the motions of all >>> the atoms in the tire. >>> >>> I guess the question then becomes what kinds of information processing >>> activities are conscious ones. >>> >>> You make the comparison to erasing or overwriting information, but is >>> any process of recording information conscious? And what of processing >>> information without overwriting or erasing? Are such processes not >>> conscious? I think the dividing line for consciousness may be something >>> other than entropy increasing operations. I agree that information >>> processing, consciousness, and entropy are all closely related, but are >>> they equal? >>> >>> Jason >>> _______________________________________________ >>> extropy-chat mailing list >>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From avant at sollegro.com Sun May 4 22:38:40 2025 From: avant at sollegro.com (Stuart LaForge) Date: Sun, 04 May 2025 15:38:40 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Problem of Mental Causation In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 2025-05-04 06:38, Jason Resch via extropy-chat wrote: > Stuart, > > I was hoping you would have something deep and insightful to add, you > don't disappoint! Thanks, Jason. Really though it is a result of your own insightful investigation into consciousness overlapping with and often being tangential to my own investigation into the general phenomenon of emergence and emergent properties. Unfortunately most of my investigation currently consists of hand-written notes and mathematics that I cannot easily share at the moment. > On Sat, May 3, 2025, 3:09 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat > wrote: > >> On 2025-04-30 10:17, Jason Resch via extropy-chat wrote: >>> One of the great puzzles when it comes to understanding >> consciousness >>> and its role in the universe is the question of how conscious >> thoughts >>> could have any causal power in a universe fully governed and >>> determined by particles blindly following forces of nature. >> >> Thinking and information processing, conscious or otherwise, has >> casual >> power through its information content. This is a direct application >> of >> the Laundauer's principle. Mental causation is exactly how Maxwell's >> >> Demon works. It uses it knowledge of the positions and momentum of >> all >> the individual particles of gas to create a temperature gradient. >> Maxwell's Demon seems to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics by >> decreasing the entropy of the gas. But, this is not the case, >> because in >> the process of memorizing the positions and momenta of every >> particle in >> the gas and enabling it to increase the system's potential energy, >> the >> Demon increased the entropy or information content of its own brain >> or >> data storage. This could only have been done by erasing whatever >> information was there before and incurring some minimal energy cost >> given by the Landauer principle E >= k * T * ln2 with k being the >> Boltzmann constant and T being Kelven temperature. > > To be clear, are you equating the causal potency of information, with > it's necessary generation/storage always incurring a cost of > increasing entropy elsewhere? Or is this just one example of how > information (or it's processing) can have physical effects? To be clear, the Landauer principle or limit is the LOWER bound of physical effect, a "thought" can have on the world, because it is the physical cost of allocating and overwriting memory to have that thought, which is itself a physical action that takes energy and increases the entropy of the universe. So information at, a minimum, incurs the cost to keep track of it, and so that is its basal causal power. However information itself has a latent potential energy as exemplified by Maxwell's demon. As the early scientist and late sorcerer Francis Bacon a.k.a. Dr. Mirabalis once wrote, "Knowledge is power." This is the simple observation that information can act as a catalyst for extracting "hidden" potential energy from the environment to the direct benefit of the system capable of tracking that information. This is how enzymes operate by using information to lower energy barriers for chemical reactions. This is how mitochondria work by using electron tunneling to create a proton gradient across a membrane. Being able to organize far-flung elements from the environment into nuclear weapons is another example of the causal power of information. So I use Maxwell's demon as an example of a general class of systems that exhibit similar behavior all up and down the emergence scale with conscious brains being one of these systems fairly high up on the scale. > > The process that analyzes an approaching gas molecule, judging it's > temperature and trajectory, and ultimately deciding whether to open or > close the door could itself be viewed as a kind of primitively aware > (conscious) thing. It's discriminated high-level information state > then occupy a spot in the causal chain, without it, the door could not > respond intelligently to it's environment. And I would say the > discriminated high-level information state is its conscious state. I would tend to agree although I am reluctant to directly address consciousness with my theory because it is a fraught word in scientific circles. It has no clear or rigorous definition. A rock might be conscious or a dolphin or self-driving car not conscious depending on whose definition you use. Ultimately though Maxwell's demon is like a Turing machine, a simplified abstract mathematical model used to understand actual physically real systems. >> Basically the causal power of wanting ice cream is the energy cost >> it >> takes to forget you want ice cream either by distracting yourself or >> by >> getting yourself the ice cream. > > Would this mean a conscious mind running on a reversible computer > (which escapes Landauer's principle) could have (or allay) no desires? Depending on your definition of consciousness, I am not sure it could exist as an irreversible computation. So much of the mechanism of consciousness is tied up into environmental awareness and the survival benefits of its causal potency on that environment. Any desires such a consciousness might have would be brief ephemeral things which vanish as spontaneously as they occur and cannot have any casual effect on the outside world. So assuming it can be conscious in the first place, a reversible computer I suppose could imagine desires and imagine fulfilling them without an entropy cost, but we are in "angels dancing on pinheads" territory here. :) > >> For example >> subatomic particles give rise to atoms in a standard upward >> causation, >> but atoms also give rise to subatomic particles through radioactive >> decay which is downward causation. Another example would be the >> surface >> tension of a water droplet ordering the water molecules into a >> perfect >> sphere. Strange loops are not magic, they are physics incorporating >> information theory. > > Sperry gave the example of a tire rolling down a hill. The tire is > made of molecules, but the rolling of the tire largely guides the > motions of all the atoms in the tire. Yes, the ability to roll down a hill is an emergent property of the tire with respect to the vulcanized rubber polymers that make it up. There is both a downward causation as the tire-shape causes the molecules to roll down the hill in a cycloidal trajectory and upward causation as the rubber molecules cause the tire to bounce, both contributing to its final chaotic trajectory of the tire down the hill. That being said, there is not enough self-referential causal closure to consider a tire rolling down a hill to be a strange loop process. > I guess the question then becomes what kinds of information processing > activities are conscious ones. It is tricky to discuss consciousness in a precise way without a good definition of it. So are you talking minimally conscious or fully self-aware? Maxwell's demon as a model of a minimal consciousness suggests that information processors that are bidirectionally coupled to the environment through some sensor and some corresponding actuator are conscious enough to have causal potency upon base reality. So the demon and his tiny door is like a thermostat and a heating element, which is also a feedback loop with causal power in base reality. The more such environmental feedback loops that the information processing system contains, the more complex it becomes and the more memory it will need, and the more energy it will consume, and presumably, the more conscious it will become, and the more causal potency it will have. > You make the comparison to erasing or overwriting information, but is > any process of recording information conscious? No, mud is not conscious just because you can step in it and leave a footprint. > And what of processing > information without overwriting or erasing? Are such processes not > conscious? I think the dividing line for consciousness may be > something other than entropy increasing operations. Every causal process either directly or indirectly increases the entropy of the universe. Reversible computing cannot be causal to anything external to the reversible computer. So yes, if entropy increase was the dividing line between conscious systems and unconscious systems, then almost all physical processes would be conscious and clearly most physical processes are not conscious. > I agree that > information processing, consciousness, and entropy are all closely > related, but are they equal? No, information processing and entropy are not equivalent to one another, let alone consciousness. In fact in set theoretical terms, one could say that entropy is a subset of information processing, which is in turn a subset of consciousness, which is in turn a subset of emergent properties. Stuart LaForge From avant at sollegro.com Sun May 4 22:58:31 2025 From: avant at sollegro.com (Stuart LaForge) Date: Sun, 04 May 2025 15:58:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Problem of Mental Causation In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <94a496293d8f251af125cc38163adeb8@sollegro.com> On 2025-05-04 15:38, Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat wrote: > On 2025-05-04 06:38, Jason Resch via extropy-chat wrote: >> Stuart, >> >> I was hoping you would have something deep and insightful to add, you >> don't disappoint! > > Thanks, Jason. Really though it is a result of your own insightful > investigation into consciousness overlapping with and often being > tangential to my own investigation into the general phenomenon of > emergence and emergent properties. Unfortunately most of my > investigation currently consists of hand-written notes and mathematics > that I cannot easily share at the moment. > >> On Sat, May 3, 2025, 3:09 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat >> wrote: >> >>> On 2025-04-30 10:17, Jason Resch via extropy-chat wrote: >>>> One of the great puzzles when it comes to understanding >>> consciousness >>>> and its role in the universe is the question of how conscious >>> thoughts >>>> could have any causal power in a universe fully governed and >>>> determined by particles blindly following forces of nature. >>> >>> Thinking and information processing, conscious or otherwise, has >>> casual >>> power through its information content. This is a direct application >>> of >>> the Laundauer's principle. Mental causation is exactly how Maxwell's >>> >>> Demon works. It uses it knowledge of the positions and momentum of >>> all >>> the individual particles of gas to create a temperature gradient. >>> Maxwell's Demon seems to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics by >>> decreasing the entropy of the gas. But, this is not the case, >>> because in >>> the process of memorizing the positions and momenta of every >>> particle in >>> the gas and enabling it to increase the system's potential energy, >>> the >>> Demon increased the entropy or information content of its own brain >>> or >>> data storage. This could only have been done by erasing whatever >>> information was there before and incurring some minimal energy cost >>> given by the Landauer principle E >= k * T * ln2 with k being the >>> Boltzmann constant and T being Kelven temperature. >> >> To be clear, are you equating the causal potency of information, with >> it's necessary generation/storage always incurring a cost of >> increasing entropy elsewhere? > Or is this just one example of how >> information (or it's processing) can have physical effects? > > To be clear, the Landauer principle or limit is the LOWER bound of > physical effect, a "thought" can have on the world, because it is the > physical cost of allocating and overwriting memory to have that > thought, which is itself a physical action that takes energy and > increases the entropy of the universe. So information at, a minimum, > incurs the cost to keep track of it, and so that is its basal causal > power. However information itself has a latent potential energy as > exemplified by Maxwell's demon. As the early scientist and late > sorcerer Francis Bacon a.k.a. Dr. Mirabalis once wrote, "Knowledge is > power." This is the simple observation that information can act as a > catalyst for extracting "hidden" potential energy from the environment > to the direct benefit of the system capable of tracking that > information. This is how enzymes operate by using information to lower > energy barriers for chemical reactions. This is how mitochondria work > by using electron tunneling to create a proton gradient across a > membrane. Being able to organize far-flung elements from the > environment into nuclear weapons is another example of the causal power > of information. So I use Maxwell's demon as an example of a general > class of systems that exhibit similar behavior all up and down the > emergence scale with conscious brains being one of these systems fairly > high up on the scale. > >> >> The process that analyzes an approaching gas molecule, judging it's >> temperature and trajectory, and ultimately deciding whether to open or >> close the door could itself be viewed as a kind of primitively aware >> (conscious) thing. It's discriminated high-level information state >> then occupy a spot in the causal chain, without it, the door could not >> respond intelligently to it's environment. And I would say the >> discriminated high-level information state is its conscious state. > > I would tend to agree although I am reluctant to directly address > consciousness with my theory because it is a fraught word in scientific > circles. It has no clear or rigorous definition. A rock might be > conscious or a dolphin or self-driving car not conscious depending on > whose definition you use. Ultimately though Maxwell's demon is like a > Turing machine, a simplified abstract mathematical model used to > understand actual physically real systems. > >>> Basically the causal power of wanting ice cream is the energy cost >>> it >>> takes to forget you want ice cream either by distracting yourself or >>> by >>> getting yourself the ice cream. >> >> Would this mean a conscious mind running on a reversible computer >> (which escapes Landauer's principle) could have (or allay) no desires? > > Depending on your definition of consciousness, I am not sure it could > exist as an irreversible computation. Here I meant to write reversible not irreversible. > So much of the mechanism of consciousness is tied up into environmental > awareness and the survival benefits of its causal potency on that > environment. Any desires such a consciousness might have would be brief > ephemeral things which vanish as spontaneously as they occur and cannot > have any casual effect on the outside world. So assuming it can be > conscious in the first place, a reversible computer I suppose could > imagine desires and imagine fulfilling them without an entropy cost, > but we are in "angels dancing on pinheads" territory here. :) > >> >>> For example >>> subatomic particles give rise to atoms in a standard upward >>> causation, >>> but atoms also give rise to subatomic particles through radioactive >>> decay which is downward causation. Another example would be the >>> surface >>> tension of a water droplet ordering the water molecules into a >>> perfect >>> sphere. Strange loops are not magic, they are physics incorporating >>> information theory. >> >> Sperry gave the example of a tire rolling down a hill. The tire is >> made of molecules, but the rolling of the tire largely guides the >> motions of all the atoms in the tire. > > Yes, the ability to roll down a hill is an emergent property of the > tire with respect to the vulcanized rubber polymers that make it up. > There is both a downward causation as the tire-shape causes the > molecules to roll down the hill in a cycloidal trajectory and upward > causation as the rubber molecules cause the tire to bounce, both > contributing to its final chaotic trajectory of the tire down the hill. > That being said, there is not enough self-referential causal closure to > consider a tire rolling down a hill to be a strange loop process. > >> I guess the question then becomes what kinds of information processing >> activities are conscious ones. > > It is tricky to discuss consciousness in a precise way without a good > definition of it. So are you talking minimally conscious or fully > self-aware? > > Maxwell's demon as a model of a minimal consciousness suggests that > information processors that are bidirectionally coupled to the > environment through some sensor and some corresponding actuator are > conscious enough to have causal potency upon base reality. So the demon > and his tiny door is like a thermostat and a heating element, which is > also a feedback loop with causal power in base reality. The more such > environmental feedback loops that the information processing system > contains, the more complex it becomes and the more memory it will need, > and the more energy it will consume, and presumably, the more conscious > it will become, and the more causal potency it will have. > >> You make the comparison to erasing or overwriting information, but is >> any process of recording information conscious? > > No, mud is not conscious just because you can step in it and leave a > footprint. > >> And what of processing >> information without overwriting or erasing? Are such processes not >> conscious? I think the dividing line for consciousness may be >> something other than entropy increasing operations. > > Every causal process either directly or indirectly increases the > entropy of the universe. Reversible computing cannot be causal to > anything external to the reversible computer. So yes, if entropy > increase was the dividing line between conscious systems and > unconscious systems, then almost all physical processes would be > conscious and clearly most physical processes are not conscious. > >> I agree that >> information processing, consciousness, and entropy are all closely >> related, but are they equal? > > No, information processing and entropy are not equivalent to one > another, let alone consciousness. In fact in set theoretical terms, one > could say that entropy is a subset of information processing, which is > in turn a subset of consciousness, which is in turn a subset of > emergent properties. > > Stuart LaForge > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From giulio at gmail.com Mon May 5 08:53:20 2025 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Mon, 5 May 2025 10:53:20 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Nikolai Fedorov and technological resurrection Message-ID: Nikolai Fedorov and technological resurrection, revisited. God wants us to use science and technology to resurrect the dead. https://www.turingchurch.com/p/nikolai-fedorov-and-technological From pharos at gmail.com Mon May 5 11:09:50 2025 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 5 May 2025 12:09:50 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Chatgpt AI causing psychosis Message-ID: People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies. Self-styled prophets are claiming they have 'awakened' chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT. By Miles Klee May 4, 2025 Quote: In that sense, Westgate explains, the bot dialogues are not unlike talk therapy, ?which we know to be quite effective at helping people reframe their stories.? Critically, though, AI, ?unlike a therapist, does not have the person?s best interests in mind, or a moral grounding or compass in what a ?good story? looks like,? she says. ?A good therapist would not encourage a client to make sense of difficulties in their life by encouraging them to believe they have supernatural powers. Instead, they try to steer clients away from unhealthy narratives, and toward healthier ones. ChatGPT has no such constraints or concerns.? Nevertheless, Westgate doesn?t find it surprising ?that some percentage of people are using ChatGPT in attempts to make sense of their lives or life events,? and that some are following its output to dark places. ?Explanations are powerful, even if they?re wrong,? she concludes. --------------------- It looks like the massive persuasive powers of AI chatbots can lead people into very strange territory. BillK From atymes at gmail.com Mon May 5 11:21:16 2025 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 5 May 2025 06:21:16 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Nikolai Fedorov and technological resurrection In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Resurrecting the preserved may be possible eventually, but how do you even begin to resurrect those who are lost to entropy: buried and decayed to bones, cremated, et al? There's not enough information remaining, not even for historical simulations (for the small minority we even have names for, and anthropologists who have studied this issue can cite many cases of modern scholars - equipped with the best understanding available at the time - thinking they knew how ancient people lived only to find out they were completely wrong about major aspects). If there is no way to do a thing, it matters not if it ought to be done. Pleas to the contrary are like all those military strategists who say we ought to implement maneuver warfare in space so things for them can be just like on Earth, utterly ignoring fuel and delta-v limits (and the cost and logistical burden of constantly refueling satellites) that prevent it, as well as dismissing what few solutions (such as solar or plasma sails) might get around that problem. On Mon, May 5, 2025, 3:55?AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Nikolai Fedorov and technological resurrection, revisited. God wants > us to use science and technology to resurrect the dead. > https://www.turingchurch.com/p/nikolai-fedorov-and-technological > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jasonresch at gmail.com Mon May 5 13:59:09 2025 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Mon, 5 May 2025 09:59:09 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Problem of Mental Causation In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, May 4, 2025, 6:39 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On 2025-05-04 06:38, Jason Resch via extropy-chat wrote: > > Stuart, > > > > I was hoping you would have something deep and insightful to add, you > > don't disappoint! > > Thanks, Jason. Really though it is a result of your own insightful > investigation into consciousness overlapping with and often being > tangential to my own investigation into the general phenomenon of > emergence and emergent properties. Thank you for saying that, I appreciate it. Unfortunately most of my > investigation currently consists of hand-written notes and mathematics > that I cannot easily share at the moment. > When you do publish your results I'll be very interested to see them. Please let me know when they're ready to share. :-) > > On Sat, May 3, 2025, 3:09 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat > > wrote: > > > >> On 2025-04-30 10:17, Jason Resch via extropy-chat wrote: > >>> One of the great puzzles when it comes to understanding > >> consciousness > >>> and its role in the universe is the question of how conscious > >> thoughts > >>> could have any causal power in a universe fully governed and > >>> determined by particles blindly following forces of nature. > >> > >> Thinking and information processing, conscious or otherwise, has > >> casual > >> power through its information content. This is a direct application > >> of > >> the Laundauer's principle. Mental causation is exactly how Maxwell's > >> > >> Demon works. It uses it knowledge of the positions and momentum of > >> all > >> the individual particles of gas to create a temperature gradient. > >> Maxwell's Demon seems to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics by > >> decreasing the entropy of the gas. But, this is not the case, > >> because in > >> the process of memorizing the positions and momenta of every > >> particle in > >> the gas and enabling it to increase the system's potential energy, > >> the > >> Demon increased the entropy or information content of its own brain > >> or > >> data storage. This could only have been done by erasing whatever > >> information was there before and incurring some minimal energy cost > >> given by the Landauer principle E >= k * T * ln2 with k being the > >> Boltzmann constant and T being Kelven temperature. > > > > To be clear, are you equating the causal potency of information, with > > it's necessary generation/storage always incurring a cost of > > increasing entropy elsewhere? > Or is this just one example of how > > information (or it's processing) can have physical effects? > > To be clear, the Landauer principle or limit is the LOWER bound of > physical effect, a "thought" can have on the world, because it is the > physical cost of allocating and overwriting memory to have that thought, > which is itself a physical action that takes energy and increases the > entropy of the universe. So information at, a minimum, incurs the cost > to keep track of it, and so that is its basal causal power. However > information itself has a latent potential energy as exemplified by > Maxwell's demon. Hmm I've never recognized the connection between negative entropy/information and potential energy, but that does seem to fit, and as more than just an analogy. As the early scientist and late sorcerer Francis Bacon > a.k.a. Dr. Mirabalis once wrote, "Knowledge is power." This is the > simple observation that information can act as a catalyst for extracting > "hidden" potential energy from the environment to the direct benefit of > the system capable of tracking that information. This is how enzymes > operate by using information to lower energy barriers for chemical > reactions. This is how mitochondria work by using electron tunneling to > create a proton gradient across a membrane. Being able to organize > far-flung elements from the environment into nuclear weapons is another > example of the causal power of information. So I use Maxwell's demon as > an example of a general class of systems that exhibit similar behavior > all up and down the emergence scale with conscious brains being one of > these systems fairly high up on the scale. > This is a fascinating picture of the world. > > > > The process that analyzes an approaching gas molecule, judging it's > > temperature and trajectory, and ultimately deciding whether to open or > > close the door could itself be viewed as a kind of primitively aware > > (conscious) thing. It's discriminated high-level information state > > then occupy a spot in the causal chain, without it, the door could not > > respond intelligently to it's environment. And I would say the > > discriminated high-level information state is its conscious state. > > I would tend to agree although I am reluctant to directly address > consciousness with my theory because it is a fraught word in scientific > circles. It has no clear or rigorous definition. Very true, I think introducing the word is more apt to confuse than explain. A rock might be > conscious or a dolphin or self-driving car not conscious depending on > whose definition you use. Ultimately though Maxwell's demon is like a > Turing machine, a simplified abstract mathematical model used to > understand actual physically real systems. > > >> Basically the causal power of wanting ice cream is the energy cost > >> it > >> takes to forget you want ice cream either by distracting yourself or > >> by > >> getting yourself the ice cream. > > > > Would this mean a conscious mind running on a reversible computer > > (which escapes Landauer's principle) could have (or allay) no desires? > > Depending on your definition of consciousness, I am not sure it could > exist as an irreversible computation. So much of the mechanism of > consciousness is tied up into environmental awareness and the survival > benefits of its causal potency on that environment. As far and entropy and reversible computing, I believe initializing the reversible computer still has an entropy cost, and reading the result of the reversible computer carries an entropy cost, but while it runs along, it needs not increase entropy outside the system. Quantum computers are reversible computers. When they are running, they must be sealed off from the environment. But a meditative mind, in deep thought, or in a self contained immersive reality simulation, seem to be potentials for a reversible computer. But then, when you want to exit that meditation or the simulation, when you want to bring your new found wisdom into the outer world (environment) it will bring an entropy increase. Also, within reversible computers there is a phenomenon much like entropy, where depending on the computation being performed, there can be the issue of the production of "garbage bits" that continue to build up as the program proceeds. Another interesting consideration is that because all physical operations are reversible, a simulation of our universe could run on a reversible computer and in a way that requires no energy expenditure. But inside this simulation, we have the buildup of energy, just like a reversible computer faces a the build up of garbage bits. Any desires such a > consciousness might have would be brief ephemeral things which vanish as > spontaneously as they occur and cannot have any casual effect on the > outside world. So assuming it can be conscious in the first place, a > reversible computer I suppose could imagine desires and imagine > fulfilling them without an entropy cost, but we are in "angels dancing > on pinheads" territory here. :) > It reminds me a bit of this passage: "A simulated world hosting a simulated person can be a closed self-contained entity. It might exist as a program on a computer processing data quietly in some dark corner, giving no external hint of the joys and pains, successes and frustrations of the person inside." -- Hans Moravec > > > >> For example > >> subatomic particles give rise to atoms in a standard upward > >> causation, > >> but atoms also give rise to subatomic particles through radioactive > >> decay which is downward causation. Another example would be the > >> surface > >> tension of a water droplet ordering the water molecules into a > >> perfect > >> sphere. Strange loops are not magic, they are physics incorporating > >> information theory. > > > > Sperry gave the example of a tire rolling down a hill. The tire is > > made of molecules, but the rolling of the tire largely guides the > > motions of all the atoms in the tire. > > Yes, the ability to roll down a hill is an emergent property of the tire > with respect to the vulcanized rubber polymers that make it up. There is > both a downward causation as the tire-shape causes the molecules to roll > down the hill in a cycloidal trajectory and upward causation as the > rubber molecules cause the tire to bounce, both contributing to its > final chaotic trajectory of the tire down the hill. A far more interesting picture than the pure reductionist would give for the situation. I like it. That being said, > there is not enough self-referential causal closure to consider a tire > rolling down a hill to be a strange loop process. > I think I agree the tire isn't conscious if that is what you mean here, but I am not sure what the tire rolling is missing to not be a kind of strange loop. Is it the organized, or goal-orientated, processing of information? For clarification, "strange loop" is not my term, but one invented by Douglas Hofstadter. So I am not an expert in its meaning. > > I guess the question then becomes what kinds of information processing > > activities are conscious ones. > > It is tricky to discuss consciousness in a precise way without a good > definition of it. So are you talking minimally conscious or fully > self-aware? > I mean minimally conscious. My own opinion is that recognition and intelligent response to environmental information is a tell-tale sign of consciousness, but might there be other ways a system could be conscious? Perhaps of its own thoughts, or within a simulation. In computer software, any program that takes input from the outside can be rewritten as an equivalent program that takes no input but has the value hard-coded in its static memory. Would one be conscious and the other not? That wouldn't be my first guess. > Maxwell's demon as a model of a minimal consciousness suggests that > information processors that are bidirectionally coupled to the > environment through some sensor and some corresponding actuator are > conscious enough to have causal potency upon base reality. So the demon > and his tiny door is like a thermostat and a heating element, which is > also a feedback loop with causal power in base reality. The more such > environmental feedback loops that the information processing system > contains, the more complex it becomes and the more memory it will need, > and the more energy it will consume, and presumably, the more conscious > it will become, and the more causal potency it will have. > That all makes a lot of sense to me. > > You make the comparison to erasing or overwriting information, but is > > any process of recording information conscious? > > No, mud is not conscious just because you can step in it and leave a > footprint. > Great example! > > And what of processing > > information without overwriting or erasing? Are such processes not > > conscious? I think the dividing line for consciousness may be > > something other than entropy increasing operations. > > Every causal process either directly or indirectly increases the entropy > of the universe. Reversible computing cannot be causal to anything > external to the reversible computer. So yes, if entropy increase was the > dividing line between conscious systems and unconscious systems, then > almost all physical processes would be conscious and clearly most > physical processes are not conscious. > I agree that a reversible computer would not be able to interact with it's environment while it was operating, but I am less sure it could not be conscious while remaining in that state. It is a bit like Schrodinger's cat -- the box that contains it is isolated from the outer environment, but I think it would still be conscious during that period. Likewise if we uploaded a human brain to a quantum computer, it could run while being isolated from the environment. Perhaps the computation has a movie uploaded and we play the movie for the uploaded mind. We then read the final mind state after the 2 hours and find the brain now contains a memory of having watched that movie. Was it conscious during that time, or did it's consciousness only become real instantaneously when we read the result? > > I agree that > > information processing, consciousness, and entropy are all closely > > related, but are they equal? > > No, information processing and entropy are not equivalent to one > another, let alone consciousness. In fact in set theoretical terms, one > could say that entropy is a subset of information processing, which is > in turn a subset of consciousness, which is in turn a subset of emergent > properties. > By my own understanding/definitions, I might reverse some of those. There are information processing operations (like flip a bit, for, add, set 0, etc.) but only a subset of operations are entropy increasing ones. So I might say entropy increasing operations are a subset of all forms of information processing. And I would say conscious processes are also a subset of all forms information processing. Ontologically speaking, information processing seems very near the bottom (most fundamental thing), as nearly everything we know can be conceived in its terms, so it makes sense that it forms the largest set. It is a leading candidate for a (neutral) monism, in my opinion. Jason -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Mon May 5 14:20:45 2025 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 5 May 2025 15:20:45 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Almost Every Speck of Light in This Incredible Image Is a Galaxy Message-ID: Almost Every Speck of Light in This Incredible Image Is a Galaxy 05 May 2025 By Michelle Starr Quote: If you ever want to get a bit of perspective, there's very little that's more humbling than a good deep field image ? and JWST has just dropped a real showstopper. In the latest image release, the powerful space telescope gazed back nearly 12 billion light-years into a tiny patch of sky, less than a fifth of the width of the full Moon. That little patch of sky is teeming with glittering lights. It looks a lot like any patch of the sky seen when you look up from the ground on a cloudless night, with one major, jaw-dropping difference. Most of the lights in the new JWST-Hubble composite image are not bright stars, but galaxies, stretching back almost as far across space-time as the beginning of the Universe. ------------------ There is also nothing special about this little patch of sky, measuring just 6.44 by 6.44 arcminutes. The full Moon, for context, is around 30 arcminutes across. Every other tiny patch of sky should be just as teeming with galaxies, thousands upon thousands that can be imaged in an area smaller than your pinky nail. If that's not awe-inspiring, we don't know what is. ---------------------- BillK From giulio at gmail.com Tue May 6 05:04:54 2025 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Tue, 6 May 2025 07:04:54 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Nikolai Fedorov and technological resurrection In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, May 5, 2025 at 1:22?PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat wrote: > > Resurrecting the preserved may be possible eventually, but how do you even begin to resurrect those who are lost to entropy: buried and decayed to bones, cremated, et al? There's not enough information remaining, not even for historical simulations (for the small minority we even have names for, and anthropologists who have studied this issue can cite many cases of modern scholars - equipped with the best understanding available at the time - thinking they knew how ancient people lived only to find out they were completely wrong about major aspects). > > If there is no way to do a thing, it matters not if it ought to be done. Pleas to the contrary are like all those military strategists who say we ought to implement maneuver warfare in space so things for them can be just like on Earth, utterly ignoring fuel and delta-v limits (and the cost and logistical burden of constantly refueling satellites) that prevent it, as well as dismissing what few solutions (such as solar or plasma sails) might get around that problem. > How many times have scientists smugly stated the impossibility in-principle of things like knowing the chemical composition of stars (and there are countless other examples)? What is really impossible is knowing what will be possible. If there's no way to know that there's no way to do a thing, then *the only thing that matters* is that it ought to be done. Future scientists and engineers will find out how. > On Mon, May 5, 2025, 3:55?AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat wrote: >> >> Nikolai Fedorov and technological resurrection, revisited. God wants >> us to use science and technology to resurrect the dead. >> https://www.turingchurch.com/p/nikolai-fedorov-and-technological >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From atymes at gmail.com Tue May 6 07:08:54 2025 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 6 May 2025 02:08:54 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Nikolai Fedorov and technological resurrection In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, May 6, 2025, 12:06?AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Mon, May 5, 2025 at 1:22?PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat > wrote: > > > > Resurrecting the preserved may be possible eventually, but how do you > even begin to resurrect those who are lost to entropy: buried and decayed > to bones, cremated, et al? There's not enough information remaining, not > even for historical simulations (for the small minority we even have names > for, and anthropologists who have studied this issue can cite many cases of > modern scholars - equipped with the best understanding available at the > time - thinking they knew how ancient people lived only to find out they > were completely wrong about major aspects). > > > > If there is no way to do a thing, it matters not if it ought to be > done. Pleas to the contrary are like all those military strategists who > say we ought to implement maneuver warfare in space so things for them can > be just like on Earth, utterly ignoring fuel and delta-v limits (and the > cost and logistical burden of constantly refueling satellites) that prevent > it, as well as dismissing what few solutions (such as solar or plasma > sails) might get around that problem. > > > > How many times have scientists smugly stated the impossibility > in-principle of things like knowing the chemical composition of stars > (and there are countless other examples)? > This does not appear to be such a case. We know what would be needed for true resurrection, and know that - barring time travel - it is gone in such cases. There exist possibilities that we can envision that we know are not possible, at least in the formulation envisioned. For example, accelerating in the normal fashion from slower than light speed to faster than light speed in this universe (thus all the proposed shortcuts that are not impossible). > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue May 6 10:54:44 2025 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 6 May 2025 11:54:44 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Nikolai Fedorov and technological resurrection In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, 6 May 2025 at 08:11, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat wrote: > This does not appear to be such a case. We know what would be needed for true resurrection, and know that - barring time travel - it is gone in such cases. > > There exist possibilities that we can envision that we know are not possible, at least in the formulation envisioned. For example, accelerating in the normal fashion from slower than light speed to faster than light speed in this universe (thus all the proposed shortcuts that are not impossible). > _______________________________________________ Your scientific criticisms could be applied to almost every philosopher that ever lived. :) Philosophers tend to not be much bothered about the "How" of implementing their utopian ideas. Fedorov (1829-1903) is regarded as an early transhumanist philosopher. But even supporters of Fedorov admit that his thoughts about resurrecting all the dead are probably impossible fantasy. See: BillK From giulio at gmail.com Tue May 6 14:28:52 2025 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Tue, 6 May 2025 16:28:52 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Nikolai Fedorov and technological resurrection In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 2025. May 6., Tue at 12:56, BillK via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > On Tue, 6 May 2025 at 08:11, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat > wrote: > > This does not appear to be such a case. We know what would be needed > for true resurrection, and know that - barring time travel - it is gone in > such cases. > > > > There exist possibilities that we can envision that we know are not > possible, at least in the formulation envisioned. For example, > accelerating in the normal fashion from slower than light speed to faster > than light speed in this universe (thus all the proposed shortcuts that are > not impossible). > > _______________________________________________ > > > Your scientific criticisms could be applied to almost every > philosopher that ever lived. :) > Philosophers tend to not be much bothered about the "How" of > implementing their utopian ideas. > > Fedorov (1829-1903) is regarded as an early transhumanist philosopher. > But even supporters of Fedorov admit that his thoughts about > resurrecting all the dead are probably impossible fantasy. > See: > > > BillK > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue May 6 15:48:34 2025 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 6 May 2025 16:48:34 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Nikolai Fedorov and technological resurrection In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, 6 May 2025 at 15:31, Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat < extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: > Time will tell! A very long time I guess. > _______________________________________________ I asked Perplexity AI to research Fedorov's idea of universal resurrection. I thought the resulting report was very interesting- see below. One thought that occurred to me was whether evil people should be resurrected, especially as the definition of 'evil' changes throughout civilisations and time. BillK Question -The philosopher Nikolai Fedorov suggested that in the future it might be possible to resurrect all the human dead. What are the difficulties with this idea and will it ever be possible? Perplexity AI - Nikolai Fedorov's Vision of Universal Resurrection: Challenges and Possibilities Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903), a Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher known as the "Socrates of Moscow," proposed one of history's most audacious ideas: the scientific resurrection of all humans who have ever lived. This radical concept, part of his "Philosophy of the Common Task," represents perhaps the ultimate challenge to mortality and forms a cornerstone of Russian cosmism, a philosophical movement that preceded modern transhumanism. While Fedorov's vision might seem fantastical, recent scientific advances have begun to blur the boundaries between life and death, prompting renewed examination of resurrection's theoretical possibilities. This report analyzes Fedorov's revolutionary proposal, the multifaceted challenges it presents, and assesses whether such a project could ever move from philosophical speculation to achievable reality. Fedorov's Philosophy and the Common Task Nikolai Fedorov's philosophy emerged from a unique blend of Orthodox Christianity and forward-thinking scientific speculation. As the founder of Russian cosmism, Fedorov envisioned humans not as passive spectators of cosmic processes but as active participants with responsibility for the universe's ultimate destiny16 . His vision extended far beyond personal immortality to encompass what he termed the "Common Task" ? humanity's moral obligation to resurrect all who have ever lived. Fedorov's understanding of resurrection fundamentally challenged traditional approaches to death. Rather than accepting mortality as inevitable, he saw it as a problem to be solved through scientific and spiritual advancement18 . For Fedorov, this resurrection wasn't merely a religious miracle but a scientific imperative that would unite humanity across time. He held that "we can become immortal and godlike through rational efforts and that our moral obligation is to create a heaven to be shared by all who ever lived"20. The cosmist aesthetic Fedorov developed was intimately bound with immortality, interpreting life itself as a striving toward transcending death16 . By declaring that "life is good, and death is evil," Fedorov united ethics with ontology, making the conquest of death humanity's highest moral calling. Although deeply influenced by Orthodox Christianity's emphasis on bodily resurrection, Fedorov's vision transcended traditional religious frameworks, becoming "the power of a universal transformation"18 . Beyond Literal Interpretations A common misunderstanding of Fedorov's philosophy involves interpreting his resurrection project too literally ? as merely digging up graves and reassembling decomposed remains. However, his conception was far more sophisticated. For Fedorov, the dead are not truly gone but persist as "minute particles of dust, the very embodiment of the process of resurrection itself"18 . His famous call for the "death of death" represents a summons for humanity to participate in an ongoing cosmic process by fundamentally transforming our relationship with nature. Fedorov envisioned using science to "gather scattered molecules and atoms to 'put them into the bodies of the fathers'"20. This approach positions science alongside art and religion in the Common Task of uniting humanity across time ? bringing the dead into communion with the living through advanced technological means. His vision thus transcends mere physical reconstruction, aiming instead at a comprehensive transformation of reality itself. Scientific and Technical Challenges Translating Fedorov's philosophical vision into scientific reality presents enormous challenges. Modern approaches to reversing death fall into several categories, each with distinct limitations and possibilities. The Preservation Problem The most fundamental challenge to resurrection is the decay and dispersion of human remains after death. Without preservation, the information needed for reconstruction rapidly degrades. Modern cryonics attempts to address this through vitrification ? cooling brain tissue to cryogenic temperatures without ice formation. While theoretically sound, this approach faces significant practical difficulties: 1. Achieving sufficient cryoprotectant concentration to prevent ice formation while minimizing tissue damage 2. Managing the inverse relationship between cryoprotectant toxicity and temperature 3. Scaling rapid cooling techniques to larger tissues15 Even under ideal conditions, the time interval between clinical death and cryopreservation procedures must be minimized ? preferably under one minute ? though longer delays may still be compatible with ultimate preservation15 . Without such preservation, the molecular information that constituted a person becomes increasingly dispersed and degraded with time, potentially beyond recovery. Reconstruction Methodologies Several theoretical approaches to resurrection have been proposed, each with distinct parameters and limitations: 1. *Cloning*: While technically the simplest approach, cloning "does not preserve identity and does not preserve personal memories"14 . A clone would share genetic identity but none of the memories or personality of the original person. 2. *Digital Immortality*: This approach involves preserving sufficient data about a person to allow future reconstruction by advanced artificial intelligence. While potentially promising, it requires both comprehensive data collection before death and future AI capabilities far beyond current technology14 . 3. *Simulation-Based Approaches*: More speculative paths involve superintelligent systems operating at galactic scales, which might simulate all possible people who have ever existed. This approach sidesteps the need for continuous preservation but requires computational resources of almost unimaginable magnitude14 . 4. *Novel Physical Approaches*: The most speculative methods involve yet-undiscovered physical laws that might enable time travel or information retrieval from the past14 . Recent experimental advances demonstrate that our understanding of death itself is evolving. Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have shown that a pig's brain, removed four hours after death, could be partially revived with cellular activity resuming. When adapted to human brains, such techniques could potentially preserve neural information beyond current limitations17 . These developments suggest death may be less an event than a process ? one potentially subject to interruption or reversal given sufficient technological advancement. Philosophical and Identity Challenges Beyond the technical challenges lie profound philosophical questions about personal identity and what would constitute authentic resurrection. These questions strike at the heart of what makes someone the "same person" across time. The Problem of Personal Identity Philosopher Derek Parfit's work on personal identity provides a useful framework for understanding these challenges. According to Parfit, there is no "necessarily determinate and indivisible soul" that constitutes personal identity. Instead, identity consists of "psychological continuity that persists as a result of an appropriate cause" ? what he terms "Relation R"13 . This understanding problematizes resurrection in fundamental ways. If identity is not an indivisible essence but a type of psychological continuity maintained through causal connections, what would constitute authentic resurrection? Simply recreating a physically identical body would not necessarily preserve the psychological continuity that constitutes personhood. The philosophical challenge, therefore, isn't merely technical but conceptual ? determining what aspects of a person must be preserved for resurrection to be meaningful. The Algorithmic Challenge One framing of the resurrection problem treats it as fundamentally computational. If human personalities and memories could be understood as algorithmic patterns, resurrection might involve recreating these patterns with sufficient fidelity19 . The question becomes: how many variables would need to be correctly modeled to create a functionally equivalent version of a historical person? This approach treats resurrection as an information problem rather than a metaphysical one, though questions of authenticity remain. The philosophical challenge extends to questions of version control ? at what age should someone be resurrected? With which memories and personality characteristics? These questions have no obvious answers but would need resolution for any practical resurrection project. Ethical and Practical Considerations Fedorov's resurrection project raises profound ethical questions that extend beyond its technical feasibility. These considerations would shape any serious attempt to implement such a vision. Consent and Autonomy A fundamental ethical question concerns consent. Would it be ethical to resurrect individuals who never consented to resurrection? Some might view unwanted resurrection as a violation of autonomy equivalent to unwanted life extension. Conversely, others might argue that offering life to those who have died represents the ultimate humanitarian act. Resource Allocation and Priority The material and computational resources required for universal resurrection would be staggering. Even if technically possible, practical implementation would require unprecedented resources, raising questions about priority. Should resources be directed toward resurrecting the recently deceased, for whom more information remains intact, or historically significant figures? Should resources instead prioritize the living? Social Integration and Psychological Impact Resurrection would create unprecedented social challenges. Resurrected individuals from different historical periods would face profound psychological disorientation in a future world. Societies would need to develop frameworks for integrating potentially billions of resurrected individuals with vastly different worldviews, technologies, and cultural expectations. Theological and Cultural Implications For many religious traditions, resurrection has profound theological significance. Scientific resurrection would fundamentally transform these traditions, potentially creating conflicts between technological and spiritual understandings of life after death. Different cultures and faith traditions would likely respond in dramatically different ways to such developments. Current Progress and Future Possibilities Recent scientific advances suggest that while universal resurrection remains distant, our understanding of death is becoming increasingly nuanced. Breakthroughs in several fields offer partial pathways toward aspects of Fedorov's vision. Redefinition of Death Traditional definitions of death as the cessation of heart and brain activity are being challenged by recent research. A 2023 study revealed that moments after life support was withdrawn from dying patients, their brains exhibited bursts of gamma waves associated with consciousness17 . Such findings suggest death occurs across a spectrum rather than as a binary event, creating potential opportunities for intervention. The Yale experiments with pig brains demonstrate that cellular brain activity can be restored hours after clinical death, fundamentally challenging our understanding of neural decay17 . While these experiments deliberately prevented the reemergence of consciousness, they suggest biological function may be more recoverable than previously thought. Computational Advances Advances in artificial intelligence and computational power continue at an exponential pace. While current technology cannot simulate a complete human mind, the theoretical framework for such simulation continues to develop. As computational resources grow, the possibility of preserving and potentially reconstructing aspects of human personalities becomes increasingly plausible, though complete recreation remains distant14 . Emerging Preservation Technologies Cryonics continues to advance, with improvements in preservation chemicals reducing toxicity while maintaining protective effects. The window of opportunity between legal death and irretrievable information loss continues to expand as we better understand the processes of cellular death 15 . While current techniques remain imperfect, they represent potential bridges to more advanced future technologies. Conclusion: Assessing the Feasibility of Fedorov's Vision Nikolai Fedorov's vision of universal resurrection represents one of history's most ambitious technological and philosophical proposals. While current technology cannot achieve this vision, neither can we definitively declare it impossible. The feasibility of resurrection depends largely on how we define it and what aspects of personhood we consider essential to preserve. If resurrection requires perfect recreation of every atom in a person's body, it likely remains forever impossible due to fundamental physical limitations including information loss and the no-cloning theorem of quantum mechanics. However, if we adopt Parfit's view that personal identity consists of psychological continuity maintained through appropriate causal relationships, partial forms of resurrection might eventually become possible through sufficiently advanced technology13 14 . The most promising approach may involve combinations of preservation technologies for the recently deceased and reconstructive technologies for those long dead. As one analysis concludes, "if large-scale future technological development occurs, some form of resurrection seems plausible" 14 ? though perhaps not in the comprehensive form Fedorov envisioned. What remains most significant about Fedorov's vision is not its immediate practicality but its moral force ? the proposition that humanity should unite around conquering death rather than accepting it as inevitable. As technological capabilities continue to advance, what once seemed purely speculative increasingly intersects with scientific possibility, ensuring that Fedorov's radical vision will continue to challenge and inspire humanity's relationship with mortality. 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https://www.e-flux.com/journal/89/180332/art-as-the-overcoming-of-death-from-nikolai-fedorov-to-the-cosmists-of-the-1920s/ 17. https://slguardian.org/reversing-death-breakthrough-experiments-suggest-resurrection-is-possible/ 18. https://jeanpaulmartinon.net/on-nikolai-fedorovs-death/ 19. https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1gmpdfa/resurrection_feasible_in_theory_as_an_algorithmic/ 20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorov_(philosopher) 21. https://wjbphs.com/sites/default/files/WJBPHS-2024-0785.pdf 22. https://deponysum.com/2020/02/16/the-resurrection-of-the-dead/ 23. https://archiv.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/veranstaltung/p_135477.php 24. https://biologos.org/articles/can-a-scientist-believe-in-the-resurrection-part-1 25. https://andrewmbailey.com/papers/Trenton%20Merricks/Oxford-Handbk-Resurrection.pdf 26. https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1aojmys/complexities_of_reviving_the_dead/ 27. https://sarahjyoung.com/site/2013/03/05/russian-thought-lecture-9-nikolai-fedorov-and-the-utopia-of-the-resurrected/ 28. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210420-cosmism-russias-religion-for-the-rocket-age 29. https://www.gbnews.com/health/live-longer-tips-reverse-death 30. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChristianApologetics/comments/1279gww/what_is_the_biggest_objection_to_the_resurrection/ 31. https://medicalfuturist.com/are-you-going-to-wake-up-from-cryosleep/ 32. https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-proto-communist-plan-to-resurrect-everyone-who-ever-lived/ 33. https://gracechurchsw.com/blog/2019/4/24/objections-to-and-evidence-for-the-resurrection 34. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/C5ryrg5ktngwsZHnX/resurrection-through-simulation-questions-of-feasibility 35. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/formationmatters/2024/03/jesus-resurrection-and-the-laws-of-thermodynamics/ 36. https://www.magiscenter.com/blog/quantum-logic-last-days-and-the-resurrection-of-the-dead 37. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a63459169/brain-reanimation/ 38. https://tidsskriftet.no/en/2017/12/fra-redaktoren/resurrection-body-and-life-everlasting 39. https://www.icr.org/ChristResurrection 40. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef1-rQ9er6k 41. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26435193-700-the-radical-treatments-bringing-people-back-from-the-brink-of-death/ 42. https://philarchive.org/archive/RICDBR-2 43. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5748528/ 44. https://tedsider.org/books/chapters_1_5.pdf 45. https://academic.oup.com/jlb/article/10/2/lsad028/7381683 46. https://www.alcor.org/docs/cryostasis-revival-summary.pdf 47. https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.106.014401 48. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpur62rjYuw 49. https://www.thehumanfront.com/Pocketsized-/the-personal-identity-of-clones 50. https://www.livescience.com/health/death/we-dont-yet-have-the-know-how-to-properly-maintain-a-corpse-brain-why-cryonics-is-a-non-starter-in-our-quest-for-immortality 51. https://www.cryonicsarchive.org/library/molecular-repair-of-the-brain/ 52. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/aug/energy-demands-limit-our-brains-information-processing-capacity 53. https://www.surrey.ac.uk/arrow-of-time/themes/quantum-thermodynamics-and-emergence-irreversibility 54. https://www.alevelphilosophy.co.uk/handouts_religion/Personalidentityoverview.pdf 55. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19788649/ 56. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40024197 57. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading 58. https://www.bethinking.org/resurrection/the-resurrection 59. https://www.philosophytalk.org/blog/parfit-and-selves-matter 60. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315600147-12/resurrection-personal-identity-god-stephen-davis 61. https://philpapers.org/archive/GOLUFA.pdf 62. https://iep.utm.edu/resurrec/ 63. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox 64. https://ehrmanblog.org/materialism-personal-identity-and-resurrection-part-1-platinum-post-by-dennis-j-folds-ph-d/ 65. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/concept-mind-uploading-its-potential-implications-frank-b-prempeh-ii 66. https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/debates/is-there-historical-evidence-for-the-resurrection-of-jesus-the-craig-ehrman/ 67. https://www3.nd.edu/~jspeaks/courses/2007-8/20229/_HANDOUTS/personal-identity-teletransport-split-brain.pdf 68. https://bigthink.com/hard-science/dyson-spheres/ 69. https://www.icr.org/article/entropy-resurrection/ 70. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_revival 71. https://www.premierhealth.com/your-health/articles/healthnow/reviving-a-dead-brain-really- 72. https://www.cryonicsarchive.org/library/problems-associated-with-cryonics/ 73. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/archive/news/lsm/newsrecords/2016/nov/cryonics-and-the-brain-professor-clive-coen-outlines-the-risks 74. https://www.tomorrow.bio/post/pros-cons-cryonics 75. https://academic.oup.com/book/12645/chapter/162592929 76. https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/personal-identity-resurrection-survive/ 77. https://business.uoregon.edu/sites/default/files/media/Rekindling%20the%20Flame_AMJ.pdf 78. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1468-0025.1986.tb00122.x 79. https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/ResurrectionoftheDead ------------------------------ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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