From ryan_canolty@yahoo.com  Sat Aug 11 06:52:43 2001
Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2001 06:52:42 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: transhuman possilbility explosion, but still, what's the point?
To: Allison Best <allison.best@alumni.duke.edu>,
        Scott Christensen <sc@ewav.com>, Ryan Fife <theman@followryan.com>,
        Michael Fuchs <fuchs@michaelfuchs.org>,
        Matt Grabowy <homonculous@mindspring.com>,
        Hilary Grant <hilarygrant2001@aol.com>,
        Alison Henry <ali.henry@talk21.com>,
        Alexander Heublein <alex@heublein.net>,
        Jeremy Kassis <jfk@stanfordalumni.org>,
        Joe Laltrello <jlaltrel@us.ibm.com>,
        Cal Lott <lottc@wellton-associates.com>,
        Mandy Moore <mmoore@digital-impact.com>,
        Chad Poplawski <cpoplawski@yahoo.com>,
        Shawn Tseng <snitch@zonker.stanford.edu>

Soon after reading Michael’s email about how the human species is going
to defeat death, and mulling over Snitch’s response to it, I found
myself wandering the aisles in the new Athens, GA Borders bookstore.  I
tend to bounce between the science, religion, and philosophy sections,
waiting for something to jump out at me.  And this time, as before, I
was not disappointed -- a squat book leapt off the shelf and nestled
itself into my hand: Damien Broderick’s _The Spike: How Our Lives are
Being Transformed by Rapidly Advancing Technologies_.  It seemed to
resonate with Michael’s impending neo-immortality theme, discussing
state-of-the-art developments in biotechnology, nanotechnology,
artificial intelligence, medicine, computational power, and the like. 
All themes that I groove on, but ones which I hadn’t been keeping up
with too well.  Other things had come up in my life, and I hadn’t been
keeping track of the state-of-the-art, the latest and greatest.  This
seemed like a book which, while not bringing up totally new ideas, might
be a good place to refresh the old ones and show the connections
(where’s James Burke when you need him?) between them all.  I’m still
reading it, but while doing so I just wanted to throw some seeds into
the supersaturated solution of this memespace and see if they
crystallized.  Thus:

What is it like to be a 22nd century bat?  That is, if you are living in
a time after the advent of computer augmented intelligence, where you
can plug the Encyclopedia Britannica into your skull’s memory expansion
slot, learn new skills instantly (a la -- dare I say it -- _The
Matrix_), or are now able to hold 100,000 items in your working memory
vice the usual 7 -- if you can do this, what is your experience like? 
Are you still human (whatever that means) or have you gone trans- or
post-human?  If you can instantly communicate with others via direct
stimulation of their semantic networks, without bothering with this
archaic verbal, linear transmit-and-receive speech, what separates one
entity from another?  Can we even imagine what such an existence is
like, when the patterns of mind are being played out on computers
operating at 100 million times the speed of our current meat computer
platform, the homo sapiens brain?  Earlier, Snitch commented that
“...this would not be an evolution from within us...it would be Science
with the capital S (as designed by imperfect humans) imposing this false
perfection on the human form and then freezing that physical form --
forever imperfect and static. And at what price? I would argue to the
loss of everything that makes us human.”  I agree that such beings would
no longer be human, but this transformation will be due to a boiling or
massive expansion of the possibilities rather than a restriction or
freezing of them.  

Broderick makes the case that within the next hundred years, as the
exponential curves of technological development converge and reinforce
each other, we will experience a Spike, a Singularity, beyond which we
will be unable to extrapolate the trends and predict what life will be
like.  Looking at the course of human history thus far and tracking the
trends, I would have to agree.

It is as if the human species had just discovered the idea of games.  We
have been playing tic-tack-toe for a little while now, getting a little
attitude about it, knowing that no one can beat us.  But suddenly
checkers comes along, and the field shifts.  We may not have the
brainpower, the necessary computational structures to play checkers, let
alone chess or Go.  An entity maxed out at tic-tac-toe cannot even
imagine what chess is like.  We like to think that we humans have the
capacity for full rationality (if only we try harder), but what if we
are only minimally rational?  Just rational enough to gain a survival
edge, while a vast domain of higher rationality exists waiting to be
explored by creatures with the right computational tools?  Are we
nearing a time where humans could give birth to a different order of
sentient being, one that is able to detect patterns and experience the
world on a level not only unknown but unknowable to humans?

These are not far future questions.  If Moore’s law of computational
power doubling holds, we could have computers with the raw processing
power required by 2040.  Knowing how to program them is an entirely
different matter.  Read _Consciousness Explained_ to get some pointers. 
But lets say that some computer scientist is able to grow a genuine
computational intelligence via genetic algorithms or something.  It
would seem that humans would be passing the baton to the next iteration
of life.  All the real action and drama would be with that new form of
life and the societies created by them.  Homo sapiens are no longer the
best show in town.  Now it is their mind children.

What questions are important then?  Which ones remain, vital as ever for
any being who might ask, and which ones might disappear, seen to be the
silly pseudoproblems that they are?

Snitch notes: “As I see it (and in my line of work I manage to see
both), life and death exist as two connected points on one plane with
one defining the other. To reinterpret your Camus quote a bit: There is
not truly life as we know how to process it without death always waiting
in the wings for us. This is not to say that these immortal folks of the
future do not 'exist'. But I argue that they are not 'alive.' Taking
away infirmity, takes away all that one has to struggle against; it
takes away the ultimate reference point.”  It is true that some
problems, such as mandatory death, would drop away -- but doesn’t it
often seem like the solution to one set of problems brings another new
set into existence?  The immortal folks of the future may not worry
about the same things that we do, but they would have their own boundary
conditions: what makes life meaningful when, unlike all good stories,
there is no end to it?  What is it like inside a black hole?  How are we
going to avoid the heat death of the universe?  Do we want to try?  They
will have their own struggles and questions to beat their heads against
and keep them entertained.

I have focused on artificial intelligence, but nanotech or extreme
biotech bring you to the same point -- a singularity beyond which our
imaginations fail and we cannot describe, predict, or relate to the
future which may unfold.  It is like trying to imagine geometry in 13
space dimensions.  You can do the math, but you don’t have an intuitive
feel for what is happening.

One thing that we will have in common with the beings to come is a
desire for meaning.  That is, the question “What’s the point?” will nag
at them as much as it does us -- if not more so.  They’ll have more time
to think about it.  As Michael noted: “InL'HOMME REVOLTE (or, THE
REBEL), Camus makes a number of comments related to this, and that also
call to mind Chad's search to -- and I realize this is what it is now --
avoid nihilism. [Camus handily defines nihilism as A) believing there is
no meaning to this life, which entails B) nothing we do matters --
anything is justified.]”  Should we or should we not commit suicide?  If
not, does it matter how we act?  These are questions that you can ignore
in day to day life without much trouble.  But once you start trying to
construct consistent philosophies to act on, they always pops up and
don’t go away.  Any thoughts on responses to them?

=====
Ryan Thomas Canolty

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