On Sat, Jul 28, 2001 at 08:50:16PM -0400, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> >
> The problems with current brains are due to physical wear and tear and the
> running down of the biological clock. *If* you fix that, *then* after a
> couple of centuries, you start running into the running down of the
> amorphous informational clock which I am postulating. Now, this is
> probably not any more difficult to fix - as a technical challenge - than
> the biological clock. But it does need to be fixed before you can live
> forever.
What is this amorphous informational clock?
As I see it, the problem is that you run into the plasticity-stability
dilemma: either keep your brain plastic, and that means you will change
and drift over time, or make it gradually less plastic, but then you
turn into a struldbrug. Due to the messy design it is hard to retain
important or core information while allowing all the other to drift, so
living indefinitely with a version of our current hardware without some
elaborate memory management systems will likely not work well.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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