*smiles* anyone ever read "Flatland"? What a
wonderful book:)
Multidimensional spaces are fun to consider... like
the thought of a four dimensional being interesecting
our three dimensional plane.... expanding suddenly
from an infinitesimal point and then receding again...
an odd thought I used to think about was how the
gravitational force of two particles might affect each
other differently in true space then we observed in
our curved-space frame... particles that appear to be
farther apart might actually be closer together, and
so on... a straight line between point a and point b
might be curved, and either point closer together...
it's fun stuff to think about.
--- Don Klemencic <klemencc@sgi.net> wrote:
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-extropians@extropy.com
> [mailto:owner-extropians@extropy.com] On
> Behalf Of QueeneMUSE@aol.com
> Sent: Monday, February 21, 2000 10:37 PM
> To: extropians@extropy.com
> Subject: Re: what it's like to be uploaded
>
> I've been thinking about uploading for about thirty
> years since reading
> Arthur C. Clarke's book Profiles of the Future-in
> particular the chapter
> entitled 'The Obsolescence of Man'. That changed my
> perspective completely.
> (And my 'metaphysics' as well. I learned in that
> book to see the world in
> terms of information patterns, processes and
> systems, instead of substances
> and entities.)The only other book in the same
> mind-blowing league for me was
> Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation.
>
> Zero Powers point about communication is an
> important part of it. Think of
> the flow of information inside a brain compared to
> the meager bandwidth
> outside-words, spoken or written, with a major
> assist in some regards from
> art.
>
> I think it's clear that government in any sense that
> we've known it will be
> a thing of the past-we don't need ruler nerve cells
> for a brain to function.
> With this kind of bandwidth we won't need rulers for
> society either.
>
> Psychology will become a mature science and
> engineering discipline, applied
> to making real changes in people. We will certainly
> need that before we will
> be able to handle the profound intimacy we have to
> look forward to. Virtual
> reality will be an important tool for 'growth
> scenarios': revisiting the
> past and replacing dysfunctional (or at least
> non-optimal) emotional
> patterns with better choices. The individual will be
> in charge and will be
> facilitated in making those changes with nanorobots
> adjusting synapses
> appropriately. (My personal name for this
> technology: the Dickens
> Facilitator, after Charles Dickens' invention of the
> three Christmas spirits
> who facilitated the transformation of one Ebenezer
> Scrooge. But there won't
> be anything spooky about this...or on second
> thought, maybe there will.) I
> think we will start with relatively superficial
> adjustments. That should be
> sufficient to change the general human condition to
> one described by words
> like self-actuated, happy, loving, benevolent,
> purposeful and rational. When
> we've learned enough (and with AI to assist, that
> might not take long) we
> might look at modifying the deep architecture of
> the human mind / brain.
> First we need to know what it is that we want. We'll
> learn that in
> successive stages. I think we need to achieve such a
> stable emotional
> foundation before we subject it to the strain of
> major augmentations of
> intelligence and senses. Otherwise I'm afraid to
> think what kind of
> psychopathy we might unleash in the world.
>
> Most of my thoughts about sensory augmentation
> center around the visual
> sense. The farthest out for me has been a notion
> that 'objects of the
> mind'-from ideas to music-might exist in a kind of
> visual space where they
> could be 'seen'. I had a kind of spark of
> recognition when I saw Eliezer
> Yudkowsky's description of the 'codic cortex'. Other
> things that have come
> to mind are higher-dimensional visualization,
> transperspective vision and
> transmetric vision. The latter two essentially would
> involve the ability to
> combine things we see separately into seemingly
> continuous wholes.
>
>
>
>
>
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