From extropians-request@extropy.org Wed Oct 26 03:02:28 1994 Return-Path: extropians-request@extropy.org Received: from usc.edu (usc.edu [128.125.253.136]) by chaph.usc.edu (8.6.8.1/8.6.4) with SMTP id DAA15902 for ; Wed, 26 Oct 1994 03:02:27 -0700 Received: from news.panix.com by usc.edu (4.1/SMI-3.0DEV3-USC+3.1) id AA21196; Wed, 26 Oct 94 03:02:24 PDT Received: (from exi@localhost) by news.panix.com (8.6.9/8.6.9) id GAA00754; Wed, 26 Oct 1994 06:02:00 -0400 Date: Wed, 26 Oct 1994 06:02:00 -0400 Message-Id: <199410261002.GAA00754@news.panix.com> To: Extropians@extropy.org From: Extropians@extropy.org Subject: Extropians Digest #94-10-499 - #94-10-509 X-Extropian-Date: October 26, 374 P.N.O. [06:01:23 UTC] Reply-To: extropians@extropy.org X-Mailer: MailWeir 1.0 Status: RO Extropians Digest Wed, 26 Oct 94 Volume 94 : Issue 298 Today's Topics: BIOSPHERE SURVIVAL: Desirable Information Technology [6 msgs] Brain backup proposal [3 msgs] MEDIA: Extropians in the Wall Street Journal [1 msgs] Problems with conventional environmentalism [1 msgs] Administrivia: Note: I have increased the frequency of the digests to four times a day. The digests used to be processed at 5am and 5pm, but this was too infrequent for the current bandwidth. Now digests are sent every six hours: Midnight, 6am, 12pm, and 6pm. If you experience delays in getting digests, try setting your digest size smaller such as 20k. You can do this by addressing a message to extropians@extropy.org with the body of the message as ::digest size 20 -Ray Approximate Size: 29684 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Vigdor Schreibman - FINS Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 17:08:38 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [#94-10-499] BIOSPHERE SURVIVAL: Desirable Information Technology On Tue, 25 Oct 1994, Romana Machado wrote: > >------------------------------------------------------------------- > >FINS SPECIAL REPORTS October 25, 1994 > >------------------------------------------------------------------- > >Vigdor Schreibman, editor and publisher of FINS, said the report contains > >a blueprint for combating the threat to the survival of the biosphere... > >Mike W. Perry of the Discovery Institute (an affiliate of TCI cable > television > >monopolists) blasted the report... However, Schreibman shot back, > >that the criticism was motivated by the purely opportunistic > >mentality of corporate interests, labeling the charge of > >coerciveness as an "unconscionable lie." Schreibman invited interested > >citizens to examine the ominous facts themselves, supported by a > >significant sector of the scientific community... > > Oh, please, somebody, take Vigdor out and *Simonize* him! > > Vigdor, if you had even half a clue what Extropians believe regarding > environmental issues, you'd realize how mistaken you are looking to the > Extropians list for your messianic complex support. Please go read Julian I have had a peek at the "Extropians" world view, and though it a good exercise to poke open a breath of reality into that box of nonsense. vs ------------------------------ From: Jason Jason Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 16:34:41 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [#94-10-500] Brain backup proposal I have two suggestions: 1) A lot of of informations processing goes on in other parts of the body than the brain. The processing of sensory information and "muscular" or reflex memory starts in the neurons in the spinal cord. Your nanobots ought to be able to attach to these as well. 2) Much of what we experience is determined by a lot more than when a neuron fires. The brain is not an electronic computer (binary or otherwise). Neurotransmitters are generated by different glands in both cortex, and slosh freely around the brain. A lot of information processing, espescially memory, is directly related to the particular balance of these chemicals. A neuron fires based on stimulus from one end, but once it fires, it releases chemicals at the other end. Whether those neurotransmitters reach the next neuron (or whether they reach the "right" nerurons) is largely due to a chemical balance that isn't recorded by your hypothetical nano's. A single baboon is a dancing baboon! J a s o n H a m i l t o n prophet@ksu.ksu.edu ------------------------------ From: freeman@netcom.com (Jay Reynolds Freeman) Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 14:31:41 -0700 Subject: [#94-10-501] BIOSPHERE SURVIVAL: Desirable Information Technology In great part because of being strongly pro-biosphere-survival, the First Extropian Squirrel respectfully suggests that the evident incipient flame war on this thread will serve neither the interests of any of the participants nor the positions which they represent. -- Jay Freeman, First Etropian Squirrel ------------------------------ From: fcp@nuance.com (Craig Presson) Date: Mon, 24 Oct 1994 05:13:32 -0500 Subject: [#94-10-502] BIOSPHERE SURVIVAL: Desirable Information Technology At 05:08 PM 10/25/94, Vigdor the Crapathian wrote: >On Tue, 25 Oct 1994, Romana Machado wrote: [...] >> Vigdor, if you had even half a clue what Extropians believe regarding >> environmental issues, you'd realize how mistaken you are looking to the >> Extropians list for your messianic complex support. Please go read Julian > > I have had a peek at the "Extropians" world view, and though it a good >exercise to poke open a breath of reality into that box of nonsense. vs You didn't take enough of a peek, then. Be on notice that this is a private forum, property of the Extropy Institute, and it is not a forum for statist, deathist blowhards to peddle their tired policy babble. The Extropian Principles are the *starting point* for discussions in this forum, not a matter for debate. In particular, an anarcho- capitalist or at least libertarian perspective is assumed; democracy is a dirty word, especially the way you use it, to mean two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. You may certainly pass constructive criticism of ExI, its journal, activities, principles, etc., on to the ExI Board, but this list is not for that. We can ignore you or we can remove you, if you insist on ignoring the house rules. We can certainly do without your puffed-up rhetoric in any case, most of us can see through it fairly well, and I for one see it as a sure sign that the writer is more intent on sounding authoritative that on having the facts. \\ fcp@nuance.com (Craig Presson) CPresson@aol.com\ -- WWW: http://www.nuance.com/~fcp/ -----------------\ -- President & Principal, T4 Computer Security ------> -- P.O. Box 18271, Huntsville, AL 35804 -------------/ // (205) 880-7692 Voice, -7691 FAX -----------------/ ------------------------------ From: whitaker@extropia.corp.sgi.com (Russell Whitaker) Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 15:17:29 -0700 Subject: [#94-10-503] BIOSPHERE SURVIVAL: Desirable Information Technology On Oct 25, 5:08pm, Vigdor Schreibman - FINS wrote: > Subject: BIOSPHERE SURVIVAL: Desirable Information Technology > > I have had a peek at the "Extropians" world view, and though it a good > exercise to poke open a breath of reality into that box of nonsense. vs >-- End of excerpt from Vigdor Schreibman - FINS [Apparently Vigdor didn't check his message before appending this followup fragment above.] Vigdor, You will accomplish nothing by gratuitously insulting the members of this list. If you are going to carry on this way, I suggest you save yourself the trouble and take your crusade elsewhere. If you intend to stay, I have 2 questions I'd like you to answer: 1.) Have you read the list rules? 2.) Have you paid the subscription fee for this list? If you have done neither of the above, please explain. Please do not ignore this message. For what it's worth - I _almost_ never "pull rank" - I am a board member of ExI, and have some say in the administration of this list. Awaiting your answers, -- Russell Earl Whitaker whitaker@sgi.com I.S. Assistance Center 415-390-3826 Silicon Graphics, Inc. Mountain View, CA =============================================================== 1.] If you are behind SGI's firewall, here's my WWW home page: http://extropia.corp.sgi.com:8001/people/whitaker.html 2.] Outside the SGI firewall, try this: http://www.c2.org/~whitaker/whitaker.html ------------------------------ From: machado@newton.apple.com (Romana Machado) Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 14:29:46 -0800 Subject: [#94-10-504] BIOSPHERE SURVIVAL: Desirable Information Technology Vigdor bleats: > However, majority rule and taxation to >support rational or essential public prograns is part of our social >contract. I was born into tax-slavery; I am coerced into the payment of tax. This is not a "social contract", but a totally non-consensual relation, as different a rape forced at gunpoint from a marriage. *Plonk!* ............................................................................ Romana Machado romana@apple.com http://www.mps.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/hpp?romanaHQ.html ............................................................................ The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong - but that _is_ the way to bet. - Damon Runyon ------------------------------ From: fcp@nuance.com (Craig Presson) Date: Mon, 24 Oct 1994 05:13:36 -0500 Subject: [#94-10-505] Brain backup proposal At 04:34 PM 10/25/94, Jason wrote: >I have two suggestions: [...] >2) Much of what we experience is determined by a lot more than when a >neuron fires. The brain is not an electronic computer (binary or >otherwise). Neurotransmitters are generated by different glands in both >cortex, and slosh freely around the brain. A lot of information >processing, espescially memory, is directly related to the particular >balance of these chemicals. Hmm, I don't think the "wet hypothesis" holds much CSF, but I could be wrong. Do you have some refs or is this a proof by assertion? \\ fcp@nuance.com (Craig Presson) CPresson@aol.com\ -- WWW: http://www.nuance.com/~fcp/ -----------------\ -- President & Principal, T4 Computer Security ------> -- P.O. Box 18271, Huntsville, AL 35804 -------------/ // (205) 880-7692 Voice, -7691 FAX -----------------/ ------------------------------ From: derek@cs.wisc.edu (Derek Zahn) Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 16:38:05 -0500 (CDT) Subject: [#94-10-506] BIOSPHERE SURVIVAL: Desirable Information Technology I have a feeling that the value of this conversation is not particularly high for my fellow extropians, but oh well... Vigdor Schreibman: > I understand that the opportunists in this society like it better when > they are buying influence in the legislature ... First, what's wrong with opportunism? You are yourself attempting to cash in opportunistically on a growing information infrastructure and a public perception of environmental danger. I heartily agree that "hundreds of billions in industry subsidies" are terrible -- whether they favor industries *you* like or not. > However, majority rule and taxation to > support rational or essential public prograns is part of our social > contract. Heh. Says who? I signed no such contract. Even if my living here is interpreted as implied consent, if you force a progran on me that isn't "rational or essential" enough (such as, say, the one you're proposing), that is coercion. > Funding > for the program would not come from any new taxation but from a realistic > reallocation of funds now being poured into a black hole for information > technology that is without sound basis. That same argument can be (and usually is) used for ANY new coercive plan. I agree that our labor should not be stolen from us and poured into a black hole. I applaud your efforts to stop that happening. But let us reallocate our funds for ourselves, thanks very much. derek ------------------------------ From: Chris Jaeb Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 17:41:25 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [#94-10-507] MEDIA: Extropians in the Wall Street Journal Romana: Your a regular celebrity. Let me know when you get your invitation to do David Letterman. The movement could use some TV time to get the word out. Keep on kickingass! Regards, Chris cameron@netcom.com ------------------------------ From: sullivan@blaze.cs.jhu.edu (Gregory Sullivan) Date: Tue, 25 Oct 94 21:05:45 EDT Subject: [#94-10-508] Problems with conventional environmentalism Vigdor Schreibman and others with a viewpoint based on current mainstream environmentalism would help themselves enormously by expanding their knowledge base. One way to do this is by reading the two books listed immediately below: K. Eric Drexler, C. Peterson with Gayle Pergamit: Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution Julian Simon: The Ultimate Resource Simon's book is a paean to the power of human thought when it is applied to the problems of living on planet earth. This is a power which environmentalists are apparently unable to recognize or which they insist on demonizing. Drexler et al's book discusses a concrete application of human thought, i.e., the revolution underway which obviates most of the reasoning of mainstream environmentalists. The actual future of the biosphere will almost certainly be completely different from the nightmare future conjured up by environmentalists. If one is unable to integrate the possibilities of nanotechnology into ones world view of the future then one has fundamentally failed to grapple with the true issues which will face us in the future. Unfortunately, some environmentalists have been unable to understand the implications of nanotechnology. Consider the recent book by the group that brought us the classic alarmist 1972 treatise ``Limits to Growth'': Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows and Jorgen Randers: Beyond the Limits The book contends that we are currently beyond sustainable levels of environmental utilization/exploitation, e.g., current rates of extraction and emission are unsupportable. Sadly, the computer model they use is woefully simplistic in the way it models technological change. It is clear that the authors do not fully understand one of the most important developing technologies: nanotechnology. They do, however, mention it briefly. Excerpt from page 83 of Beyond the Limits Instead of high temperatures, severe pressures, harsh chemicals, and brute force that have characterized manufacturing processes since the beginning of the industrial revolution, scientists are beginning to understand how to use the intelligence of molecular machines and of genetic programming. Breakthroughs in nanotechnology and biotechnology are beginning to allow industry to carry out chemical reactions the way nature does, by careful fitting of molecule to molecule [reference to footnote 43] Footnote number 43 page 259 Nanotechnology is the design and use of molecules as machines, the assembly of products in a controlled way molecule by molecule - which is the way living things are assembled. Biotechnology is a particularly sophisticated subset of nanotechnology that concentrates on the design and use of DNA molecules. For an enthusistic description of the possibilities of nanotechnology, see K. Eric Drexler and Chris Peterson, Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution (New York: William Morrow, 1991). See also ``Materials for Economic Growth,'' Scientific American (September 1986) and the special issue of Science (29 November 1991). End of excerpt It is excellent that some environmentalists have tried to educate themselves in the area of technological extrapolation. On the surface the excerpt above is a creditable attempt to explain nanotechnology but evidence of misunderstanding is found in the comment on biotechnology. Biotechnology is not a particularly sophisticated subset of nanotechnology. Instead, it is a particularly unsophisticated subset of nanotechnology. Many biotechnological capabilities are already available and exploiting the Rube Goldbergish mechanisms in cells to create products is a primarily a stopgap method or bridge method to real full nanotechnology. (Of course, biotech will remain important for medical applications.) The deeper problem with ``Beyond the Limits'' is that the authors have not assimilated the implications of what they have written in the excerpt above. For example, their computer models allow an incremental reduction in pollution (unintended and undesirable emissions) from industrial processes but do not allow a sudden reduction to zero pollution. Also, their models do not account for the large jump in capability nanotechnology would provide for cleaning up the environment. Yet, their projections run to the year 2100. Even pessimistic prognosticators who are knowledgeable about nanotechnology believe it will be developed well within 106 years. Overall, the authors and their limited computer models appear to be locked into a mindset that discounts human creativity and reasoning. Finally, I do not speak for Extropians and I personally am not sanguine about all aspects of the future. Also, I do support preserving many aspects of the current ``natural'' environment principally for aesthetic reasons. But I think one should recognize that scenarios which envision running out of energy, running out of raw materials, running out of habitable non-polluted land etc. are very unlikely to occur in the next 100 years (barring war). Other important texts on nanotechnology. K. Eric Drexler: Engines of Creation K. Eric Drexler: Nanosystems: Molecular, Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation If you are interested in a debate between Simon and a mainstream environmentalist you can read the recent book. Norman Myers and Julian Simon: Scarcity or Abundance Constructive feedback to Gregory Sullivan sullivan@cs.jhu.edu ------------------------------ From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) Date: Tue, 25 Oct 94 21:18:04 -0400 Subject: [#94-10-509] Brain backup proposal >X-Message-Reference: #94-10-446 > >I have two suggestions: > >1) A lot of of informations processing goes on in other parts of the >body than the brain. The processing of sensory information and >"muscular" or reflex memory starts in the neurons in the spinal cord. >Your nanobots ought to be able to attach to these as well. Yes there are hundreds of muscles -- but they do not learn. Well, OK, they might each learn a few hundred bits. On the other side, there are trillions of synapses. >2) Much of what we experience is determined by a lot more than when a >neuron fires. The brain is not an electronic computer (binary or >otherwise). Neurotransmitters are generated by different glands in both >cortex, and slosh freely around the brain. A lot of information >processing, espescially memory, is directly related to the particular >balance of these chemicals. Yes there are several of neurotransmitters sloshing around --- and perhaps dozens. But they don't learn. Each synapse though, learns how much of its neurotransmitter to emit, in order to fire very nearby cells. They don't slosh freely, but some hormones may circulate and affect billions of cells. So what? Consider that the more massive the effect, the less information they carry. >A neuron fires based on stimulus from one end, but once it fires, it >releases chemicals at the other end. Whether those neurotransmitters >reach the next neuron (or whether they reach the "right" nerurons) is >largely due to a chemical balance that isn't recorded by your >hypothetical nano's. To first order, the largest effect by far is on the single neural cell surface on the other side of the synapse. (No synapses connect to more than one other cell.) This is where the huge predominance of the information lies, and this -- the transsynaptic coeeficients is what the nanos should record most of. There are probably small, second order effects on nearby cells. No one knows whether these are functionally importantly significant. In some diseases, when the insulations break down, so does your mind. In any case, there's no evidence for the "chemical balance" that you postulate. Or rather, because the entire brain is made of chemicals, there no reason to suppose that most of that information can't be inferred from the synaptic geometries. However, we certainly don't yet know enough about this. It has often been conjectured that there could be other micro-anatomical structures under the membranes of the cell surface distal to the synapse, and that those structures are involved in how the cell learns to recognize -- that is, to become excited by -- particular stimulus patterns. I don't know of any evidence, however, that these intracellular circuits can compute any tricky functions. I've heard it suggested that some neurons can be conditioned to respond selectively to different firing frequencies, and it's often been speculated that they can be trained to recognize different sequential patterns -- but I haven't heard of evidence that this is due to more than selection of fragments of dendritic trees that happen to have the right geometry for making such recognitions. >A single baboon is a dancing baboon! J a s o n H a m i l t o n It is certainly true that there's more going on in the brain than binary or semilinear conductions from one cell to the next. It is likely that unless we provide approximations to those effects, the downloads won't work. OK. However, because those other effects are less spatially critical, probably to factors of thousands, we should admit their importance and plan to approximate them from the spatial data that the nonobots will gather. However, let's not throw out the baby with the bath. I expect these factors to be relatively easy to take into account, and successfully approximate, for these two reasons: to summarize---- 1. There *is* delocalized chemical information in the brain, but the amount of such information is probably 5 or 6 orders of magnitude less than the cell-to-cell connection information. This information may be turn out to be vital, but not necessarily especially interesting or difficult to understand and replicate. 2. The information in those delocalized systems probably need be approximated only very crudely. If not, then the brain itself would probably not work, inasmuch as we're always subject to moderate variations in those parameters. What I'm trying to say is that we should go easy on "chemical mysticism". Many people have been led to suppose that various chemicals have distinctive mentalistic properties in themselves -- and that's silly. We hear the same sort of thinking with regard to trace dietary chemicals and vitamins. Always remember that there's nothing magical about a vitamin. Our cells use thousands of different chemicals but, because of evolutionary accidents, we've lost theb ability to produce some of them. A vitamin has no intrinsic virtue. On the contrary each vitamin should be seen as a reminder of an unfortunate genetic disability. ___________________________________________ "Don't pay any attention to the critics. Don't even ignore them." --------- Sam Goldwyn ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V94 #298 *********************************