From extropians-request@extropy.org Sun Dec 11 15:04:31 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 PAA15631 for ; Sun, 11 Dec 1994 15:04:29 -0800 Received: from news.panix.com by usc.edu (4.1/SMI-3.0DEV3-USC+3.1) id AA24175; Sun, 11 Dec 94 15:04:19 PST Received: (from exi@localhost) by news.panix.com (8.6.9/8.6.9) id SAA09662; Sun, 11 Dec 1994 18:04:02 -0500 Date: Sun, 11 Dec 1994 18:04:02 -0500 Message-Id: <199412112304.SAA09662@news.panix.com> To: Extropians@extropy.org From: Extropians@extropy.org Subject: Extropians Digest #94-12-436 - #94-12-445 X-Extropian-Date: December 11, 374 P.N.O. [18:01:50 UTC] Reply-To: extropians@extropy.org X-Mailer: MailWeir 1.0 Status: O Extropians Digest Sun, 11 Dec 94 Volume 94 : Issue 344 Today's Topics: Corporate Liability--Buckminster Fuller [1 msgs] ECON: Book censorship? [2 msgs] PHYS: New Model for Gravity [1 msgs] SING: Are we still evolving? [1 msgs] SING: Post-Singularity Morals [1 msgs] The Inevitability of Gibson [2 msgs] The Singularity [2 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: 30104 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: James Daugherty Date: Sun, 11 Dec 1994 07:20:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: [#94-12-436] The Inevitability of Gibson I haven't read Gibson and therefore cannot comment directly on his work, but it seems to me that the unspoken assumption of Toffler and other such post-industrial theorists is that _ENVIRONMENTALISM_ is scientifically correct and inevitable, a fact that makes industrial development of the entire world impossible. Thus, the disutopia of teeming masses stagnating in poverty while an elite of symbol manipulators rules the roost. All one has to do is study the funding of the think tanks and foundations to determine that the multi-national corporate elite supports environmentalism as a propaganda adjunct to their world natureal resource oligopolistic program. I think extropians, if they really want to see the future tilt their way, must fight with even greater tenacity the "environmentalist" conspiracy. We need memes to counter the genocidal "nature worship" that is fast being accepted throughout the world. \\\\\\\\\\\\*//////// message: info prj | get prj gopher/keytogopher | ////////////////////////////////////*\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ ------------------------------ From: nancy@genie.slhs.udel.edu Date: Sun, 11 Dec 94 12:17:48 GMT Subject: [#94-12-437] The Singularity John K Clark wrote: > >On 9 Dec 1994 Vince Kerchner vincek@intergalact.com #94-12-384 Wrote: > > >just how many neurons does it take to make one intelligent or > >self-aware? What kind of a "threshold" are you suggesting, > >and what evidence do you have to support it? > >There is something different about humans. Other animals may >have memes and a few might even have memetic evolution of a sort >but it's pretty meager, it evolves no faster and clearly plays >second fiddle to genetic evolution. With humans memetic >evolution is crucial. Without it we'd just be another biped that >never learned how to use stone tools. Upload a man and speed him Though for the long first part of the existance of the human species, I don't know if we'd have looked all that promising. >up a billion times and he will advance and eventually and learn >how to augment his intelligence. Upload a population of insects It might depend on *which* person. >and they might eventual evolve intelligence but it is by no >means a sure thing. Upload an individual cockroach and all get >is a super fast bug, forever. I don't know exactly where the >threshold is or how many neurons it takes but somewhere between >bugs and humans it's got to be there. > You're probably right about that cockroach, though. >appeared and everything changed. You could now find enormous >carnivores like "Anomalocaris" a animal nearly 3 feet in length, >or a well named beast unlike anything alive today called >"Hallucigenia" that looked like a cross between that thing in >the movie "Alien" and a bad LSD trip. The consensus seems to be that Hallucigenia was a pretty ordinary worm with bristles on its back--people had been looking at it upside down. I doubt that any amount of acceleration will enable retractions to keep up with rumors. :-) Nancy Lebovitz ------------------------------ From: James Daugherty Date: Sun, 11 Dec 1994 07:29:48 -0500 (EST) Subject: [#94-12-438] Corporate Liability--Buckminster Fuller Buckminster Fuller presents the idea in his books (Critical Path, Spaceship Earth, etc.) that limited liability is a primal evil. On the contrary, without it, capitalism is not possible and socialism a necessity. There is no reason that investors should be responsible for torts. Surely a way can be found for the officers to assume these burdens and buy liability insurance accordingly. "Looking for Deep Pockets" when damages are due is not, in my opinion, an extropian or libertarian principle. Blame or responsibility should be the issue. Who made the decision that caused the damages? For blameless accidents no one would be forced to pay in a libertarian world. \\\\\\\\\\\\*//////// message: info prj | get prj gopher/keytogopher | ////////////////////////////////////*\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ ------------------------------ From: nancy@genie.slhs.udel.edu Date: Sun, 11 Dec 94 12:34:00 GMT Subject: [#94-12-439] ECON: Book censorship? Vince Kerchner wrote: > What would you think of a bookstore which was the only one in its area and that wouldn't even order books that the owner disapproved of? >nancy@genie.slhs.udel.edu (Nancy Lebovitz) sez: > >>Does it make a difference if the seller gives the impression of >>carrying the whole field but really doesn't? > >That depends on whether you feel false-advertising is a crime. In general, I don't know that it's a crime, but I do believe that there's such a thing as sharp practice--using the customer's easily correctable ignorance against them. While I don't think that there's any way to make sharp practice illegal, I do think that there should be social pressure against it. This reminds me of an interesting ethical question that came up in Hogan's generally lousy _The Multiplex Man_. In a libertarian society, a waitress defrauds customers that she recognizes as travellers by claiming to be a prostitute, getting money up front, and then failing to show up for sex. (The customers are coming from a repressive society--it's extremely unlikely that information from those she defrauds will get back to prospective victims.) Does the restaurant owner have any obligation to try to prevent this scam? For that matter, does he have any reason to? Nancy Lebovitz ------------------------------ From: John K Clark Date: Sun, 11 Dec 1994 09:07:32 -0800 Subject: [#94-12-440] The Singularity -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- nancy@genie.slhs.udel.edu Nancy Lebovitz on Sun, 11 Dec 94 Wrote: >for the long first part of the existance of the >human species, I don't know if we'd have looked >all that promising. I disagree. There was nothing long about it, it all happened in the blink of an eye geologicaly speaking. Also I think you would have noticed something strange about this particular biped, it wasn't very strong had wimpy teeth and with the possible exception of the ground sloth was the slowest mammal alive, yet it managed to thrive and spread into different habitats. The fact that it was so unspecialized would have set it apart. >The consensus seems to be that Hallucigenia was a pretty >ordinary worm with bristles on its back--people had been >looking at it upside down. "Consensus" is much too strong a word in dealing with anything about Hallucigenia . Some think it's upside down ,some think it's only a small part of a much larger beast we haven't found yet, and some are just baffled, I've never heard anybody call it "ordinary". John K Clark johnkc@well.sf.ca.us -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.i iQCzAgUBLusvI303wfSpid95AQF7cgTw2I/R5It8W0uyjwsZuejQJXVjoYlmgQJq O07LNFLqruslMwmHvW07WSgqAoBq0gULSQNuvlVVPchv1XBx8sZnqiAA8SYuQo56 R9YwgzlNhbz6DuYKX4GnGxHmXHtXCgXUXmhzGZCS+6d0XGMdLUQzm2IYpGahZA6b yl5hGB+vshXZvXau9+VZ2FNZlQjg7slM/chyPe38fBdHBX63ghY= =kaTV -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ------------------------------ From: KMOSTA01@ULKYVX.LOUISVILLE.EDU Date: Sun, 11 Dec 1994 12:22:03 -0500 (EST) Subject: [#94-12-441] ECON: Book censorship? --Vince asks: is this censorship? Let me know your opinion on the same topic, but carried farther: My employer requires me to go through m a n d a t o r y c u l t u r a l d i v e r s i t y t r a i n i n g. The employer is a major private insurance company. Note that this kind of training is now a prerequisite for acceptance to most universities. But noe of this is government mandated! On a related issue: should member of Congress go through mandatory drug testing (my employer required me to go through one!). Krzys' ------------------------------ From: "J. LeRoy" Date: Sun, 11 Dec 1994 10:31:21 -0800 (PST) Subject: [#94-12-442] The Inevitability of Gibson > but it seems to me that the unspoken assumption of Toffler and other such > post-industrial theorists is that _ENVIRONMENTALISM_ is scientifically > correct and inevitable, a fact that makes industrial development of the > entire world impossible. Thus, the disutopia of teeming masses > stagnating in poverty while an elite of symbol manipulators rules the roost. This isn't the Gibsonesque vision. In a few of his books, there is still vast tracts of undeveloped land. And, yes, that is their vision, which is correct to an extent. The same with Marx's supposition that all capitalist states are moving toward socialistic models of governance and economy. It's correct, but what does that really matter? Not a whole lot. At the end of the first version of Bladerunner (again) there is that part where they go floating off to live happily ever after in the sunset and pine trees. Even though the "Happily Ever After" note was contrary to the story and the whole thing was chopped off in the director's cut -- that still pointed out that the manipulation of the masses is still alive and well and that people will live (for one reason or another) in unappealing circumstances while there is a big beautiful world out there. Plus, people do not understand the extent to which our current lifestyles are causing long long term degredation to the environment. At our current level and style of American development, we build 1.6 square feet of parking area for every square foot of building space. With that 1.6 square feet comes polluted water run-off, increased auto dependence due to an ever increasingly pedestrian hostile environment, increased damage to wetlands, etc. etc. etc. Add this to the fact that the fastest growing economies in the world have no zoning, few environmental regulation, zip for labor laws and poorly functioning mass transit and we've got a recipe for disaster. Like people who change their diets AFTER they have their first heart attack. J. LeRoy (bensonj@teleport.com) ------------------------------ From: Reilly Jones <70544.1227@compuserve.com> Date: 11 Dec 94 14:06:42 EST Subject: [#94-12-443] SING: Post-Singularity Morals Phil Goetz wrote 12/11/94: Good luck! I think you will be successful if you start with subjective, personal morals, bring it up to the species level and construct an absolute system of morals on a consensual basis. I don't think we'll have a consensus on how to measure complexity until we get some better ideas of the physical basis of things like time, gravity, space, etc. Not that we shouldn't try. Peter McCluskey wrote 12/10/94: I don't think you mean your bank teller's memory, or your provider's administrator's memory, or your compiler's programmer's memory. These are garbled. You are referring to informational representations of memory, not an individual's unique memory itself. I interpreted the point being made to be sharing actual subjective memories, not consensual representations of such memories. Peter again: Both likely true, but not how I interpreted the point being made. I wasn't interpreting "memories" in the context I took Phil Goetz to be using them, as being merely informational representations of subjective memories, but actually sharing subjective memories themselves. The sharing of subjective memories is self-immolation, since the material substrate of subjective memory is always unique. Perhaps I misunderstand terms like "collective personality," since I have an inordinately strong immune response against the word "collective." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Reilly Jones | Philosophy of Technology: 70544.1227@compuserve.com | The rational, moral and political relations | between 'How we create' and 'Why we create' ------------------------------ From: Reilly Jones <70544.1227@compuserve.com> Date: 11 Dec 94 14:09:49 EST Subject: [#94-12-444] PHYS: New Model for Gravity Amara Graps wrote 12/11/94: Has anyone done the reverse? Say that m=E/c^2 is actually a statement about how much mass is required to give *the appearance* of a certain amount of energy, rather than about the conversion of one fundamental thing, mass, into another fundamental thing, energy. The view would be that the physical universe is made up of spinning particles of mass completing every possible combination of movements and interactions, short of landing on top of themselves. This quantizes everything. It is the interaction of those particles and their paths that creates the appearance of energy. The theory can go pretty far at unifying the forces because the forces and effects are not disparate entities. Just as energy would arise from the motion of the particles, in the theory, so would gravity and anti-gravity. Then we could add the two theories together, divide by two, and maybe have something with a degree of practicality. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Reilly Jones | Philosophy of Technology: 70544.1227@compuserve.com | The rational, moral and political relations | between 'How we create' and 'Why we create' ------------------------------ From: pavel@PARK.bu.edu (Paul Cisek) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 1994 14:38:12 -0500 Subject: [#94-12-445] SING: Are we still evolving? >From: vincek@intergalact.com (Vince Kerchner) >X-Message-Number: #94-12-405 > >pavel@PARK.bu.edu (Paul Cisek) sez: > >>The 20 amino acid code has remain unchanged >>at least since the development of the cell-membrane > >Yes, this seems to be true. So, the time necessary to evolve new amino >acids may be "quite some time indeed". > >This does >not mean that it will never change, only that the activation energy >necessary to induce such a change (and a concomitant change in the support >system of polymerases, etc...) must be very great. Yes, and almost certainly too great for natural evolution to overcome. Similarly, it's extremely unlikely that chimps would ever develop trilateral symmetry, no matter how advantageous that might become in the future. Some phylogenetic baggage is just too powerful to alter. >You're correct in pointing out that the current map contains less than >three "quads" of information. The simplest explanation for this is >probably the correct one: 2 bases, yielding only 4 x 4, or 16, combinations >for different amino acids, are not enough to provide the diversity in >protein function we see today, while 3 full bases, yielding 4 x 4 x 4, or >64, combinations, are superfluous. I don't think so, since early evolution seemed to be able to make do with just four amino acids (judging by their ubiquity in today's species). > >As you also point out, the evolutionary tendency has been to make more and >more use of the information in all three bases, so that it is not >unreasonable to expect that at some time in the (possibly distant) future, >all three bases will be fully coded, and that our proteins will consist of >more than 20 different amino acids. No, it's pretty unreasonable to expect this. All code differentiation seemed to have been done before the invention of cells, before sex, before multicellular organisms. Since then, no change, no amino acids have been added. >I can think of 2 additional reasons why 3 bases might currently code for AA's: > > 1. In very fault-tolerant systems, three subsystems are often used to > determine overall behavior. The rationale is that while two sub- > systems might disagree, a third can cast the deciding vote. But the systems are not independent. > > 2. The selection of specific tRNA's from mRNA sequences is a matter of > 3-dimensional conformation. With only two points of attachment, > there is an unaccounted-for degree of freedom in tRNA binding > about such an axis. Three non-colinear points of attachment > unambiguously determine tRNA position and orientation, and contribute > to system rigidity during the formation of the peptide bond. There > is, however, currently still some steric freedom ("wobble") to the > tRNA-mRNA attachment, which may eventually become more stable. Each nucleid acid has more than one binding site. Glycine and cytosine form three bonds with each other, and adenine and uracil form two. So even with two pairs you'd get enough determination. The "consensus"(?) reason seems to be one of symmetry. This was proposed by Crick et.al. in 1976: A three bp frame of the form RNY (R stands for either G or A, Y stands for either C or U, and N stands for G,C,A,or U) facilitated directionality and punctuation. It allowed the template strand and its complementary daughter strand to have the same frame pattern. We still see this trend in modern RNA - autocorrelation shows peaks centered on RNY frames more than on other frames. And while originally only the central N nucleotide specified the amino acid, variation in the first and third positions were eventually utilized to specify different amino acids. But this differentiation has stopped a long time ago. > >However, the evolutionary information content, and >target of biochemical selective pressures, of an organism is its DNA, not >its protein set. Selection targets the phenotype, not the DNA. That's why neutral mutations (such as those in introns or third position nucleotides) are not selected out and can serve as a guideline for establishing genetic diversity. (Well, my statement may not be completely true, at least may not have been for pre-biotic evolution. Some RNA may have evolved to fit better into the active zone of local enzymes, but this is speculative and may not apply with the present ribosome machinery.) > >Given the redundency of the genetic code, and >the fact that changes to AA sequences far from the active sites of enzymes >may have little or no change on the conformation of the enzyme, it might be >possible for mutations to gradually accumulate over time without being >reflected in the phenotype. At some point, a critical AA change will >eventually occur which does alter enzyme shape and function, and this >change will be reflected as an observable difference in the organism. Yes, lots of mutations can accumulate. Those of "recessive" genes, those of introns, those in redundant third position base pairs... They do indeed seem to accumulate and can be used to determine genetic diversity. > >This may be the basis for the punctuated equilibrium of macroscopic >evolution. Mutations may be continuously happening to us, without our >knowledge. As you suggest, in general, random mutations are not beneficial >(any more than random changes to a computer program are beneficial), since >they act to disturb what was once a stable protein configuration. Benign >mutations probably must accumulate over time, so as to overcome the local >activation energy of the micro-evolutionary landscape without killing the >organism and its descendents, while moving the gene sequence to a new >optimal point in gene space. > Interesting. Furthermore there are developmental attractors that increase the robustness of ontogeny. These might in diminish or filter out the effect of many genetic changes until a new mutation pushes things over an edge. So you get "hopeful monsters" which might sometimes be very successful. But puctuated equilibria can be explained without this - the rate of evolution is very fast, and is constrained primarily by the fitness surface (I prefer to think of it as a web rather than a landscape) and by phylogenetic history. But when fitness windows appear, due to cataclysms or extinctions or what-have-you, things can move pretty fast... (The extinction of dinosaurs was a rather quick event, geologically speaking. Did the radiation of mammals proceed very fast following the appearance of that "niche vacuum"?) Paul Refs: A good review: Eigen, Gardiner, Schuster, Winkler-Oswatitsch (1981) "The Origin of Genetic Information", Scientific American, 244(4), pp88-118 RNY frames: Crick, Brenner, Klug, Pieczenik (1976) "A speculation on the origin of protein synthesis", Origins of Life, 7, p389 Using neutral mutations to determine diversity: Fitch, Margoliash (1967) "Construction of Phylogenetic Trees", Science, 155, pp279-284 ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V94 #344 *********************************