In a message dated 03/19/2000 1:11:51 AM Eastern Standard Time,
rowen@technologist.com writes:
> This is fascinating. You must understand that the technologies I deal with
> every day do not include cryogenics and nanotech. When I participate in
> this list, I am not inclined to shop-talk, which means I take a
> philosophical
> approach. I'm afraid I'm painfully ignorant regarding precisely those
> techno-
> logies that are of greatest interest to Extropians. So would you be willing
> to talk about this some more?
My tack on this is not to get bogged down in semantics (or semiotics) but to
address the "How" questions that science\technology\rationality might
provide, or even "God" if you prefer. An example of "How" would be a magician
viewing how another magician performs a stage illusion. The magician sitting
in the audience would have some keen insights into how the trick is achieved;
more so then I would. Having said that, my focus is then applying that
principle to how would an afterlife be achieved? The closest attempts at
this that I have encountered by bench scientists would we Hans Moravec at
Carnegie Mellon, Frank Tipler at Tulane, Max Tegmark at Penn State. After
studying their research, it seems to be that what the field needs is other
proposals, other researchers, of which their appears to be a lack of.
Briefly, Moravec in Mind Children (1988) suggests the computing power of a
neutron star be used to re-simulate all of earth's history down to this very
moment. Tipler believes that intelligent Life (robotic) will over-take the
Big Bang and collapse the cosmos into 2 physical dimensions; designed to
perpetuate and re-emulate the totality of life. Tegmark, very popular on
this list, and the Everything List, proposes that an ensamble of universes,
some of which contain you and I. In some of these, there are or will be
versions of us that will transcend mortality by simply living billions of
years.
What seems to be missing from all three scholars is follow-through. There
doesn't seem to be any fringe academia even to continue these hypothesis. I
believe that these ideas need refinement.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:05:48 MDT