[ExI] Wrestling with Embodiment

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Sun Jan 22 20:04:18 UTC 2012


On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 7:04 PM, Keith Henson wrote:
> I can think of a physics argument where we may be forced to abandon
> physical bodies.
>
> We want to be smart.  Part of being smart it the ability to think
> fast.  It seems likely our brains could be simulated in hardware at a
> rate of 200 MHz.  That's not a particularly high clock rate by modern
> standards, but it's perhaps a million times that of meat based
> thought.
>
> Trapping a fast uploaded mind in a physical body (human or robotic)
> would be incredible cruel.  They have to exist in fast simulated
> worlds if they exist at all.
>
> It's been done, and well too.  See the section in Accelerando by
> Charles Stross where Amber and a bunch of her friends go off to a
> nearby star in a coke can sized core of nanocomputers.  They live in a
> highly detailed simulation of reality with their bodies existing only
> as simulations in a shared computer environment.
> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html#Router
>
>

That's the big conceptual leap that is lacking in many discussions
about posthumans. They won't be like a slightly smarter version of us.
 Uploaded intelligence (AI or human) sees the world as frozen to a
standstill. They will be unable to communicate with humans. How can
they when a sentence takes a thousand years of their time?

BillK




More information about the extropy-chat mailing list