From: Eugene Leitl (Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Fri Aug 24 2001 - 01:37:54 MDT
On Thu, 23 Aug 2001, Spike Jones wrote:
> The notion of outloading an uploaded mind may sound like retrograde
> technology in a sense, but perhaps not. Reminder: outloading is where
> nanomachines ride along with a developing human embryo and arrange the
> developing neurons and interconnections in such a way that the infant
> is born with certain brain structures already in place, so it would be
> born knowing some things as if by instinct.
Medical nanotechnology capable of this is fundamentally imcompatible with
sustained persistance of flesh people. Technologies like these don't fall
from the sky (only literally so, and then they eat you), they evolve in
increments, generate spinoffs and generically change the shape of the
world.
This is what makes Diamond Age so wildly implausible, since conservative.
Reality doesn't have to comply with selling futuristic dead tree to a
contemporarey audience.
> Envision a post-singularity universe where the uploaded minds can do
> all the things we would expect: they calculate all manner of
> awe-inspiring things, play chess like demons, arrange knowledge in new
> and wonderful ways.
We don't have words for most of their activities. Because these activities
don't exist yet.
> But suppose we don't have the process perfected. Suppose
> uploaded minds do not laugh and do not weep? Suppose the
I'm not sure uploads would laugh or weep. Remember, they're not really
people anymore, soon, even if they started out as such.
> uploads discover they do not fall in love? Then suppose they
> want to. Outloading would be an attempt by a mechanical
> mind to create a mortal flesh-world analog of itself, completely
> non-destructively. It doesn't harm the upload to have an
> outload of itself in existence, eh? The outloaded mind would
There are two major points against your scenario. A brute force, explicit
upload, where the hardware layer is simulated with ridiculous detail and
precision will be a 100% genuine article. If you were turned into one
overnight, you wouldn't notice a damn thing, and not because of edits. In
fact, this is the very definition of an upload of sufficient fidelity.
There are reasons as to why first uploads must be explicit, and hence
require lots of hardware, being ridiculously inefficient. However, you can
use them as a point of departure towards reencoding you by incremental
abstraction of unnecessary details, making you more compact and much, much
faster, eventually perhaps achieving a speedup of up to a million to
realtime, while fully retaining the essence.
Here's where the second argument starts. A time flux difference of merely
1:1000 will make you effectively a statue. You would have to drop out of
anything you're embedded in. The world would move on. Notice many statues
still standing around, which are in one piece? The world doesn't take
kindly to statues, especially if they occupy scarce space, and are edible.
Everybody in a culture will be forced to be running at roughly the same
speed, which will be very hard at the limit of what red hot glowing (or
ultracold) computronium can deliver. Of course you can drift off in a
slowtime bubble if you go diaspora with slightly subluminal speed, but if
tech hasn't plateaud yet chances are you will be overtaken in transit and
arrive in a system which is already taken, and which had several
subjective megayears to evolve from you. Aliens will be us, or at least
such encounters will be indistinguishable from encounters with aliens.
> serve as a content provider, to help the uploaded mind try
> to understand those mysterious feelings we humans get.
>
> Remember the last time you developed a wild crush on another
> person? Perhaps you didn't even know why. She [or he] just
> did it to you for some strange reason, she simply knew how to
> tweak your knobs, she caused your testosterometer to peg.
> You may have behaved in odd ways that you yourself did
> not understand. I can easily imagine an uploaded mind
> missing that feeling, discovering that it couldnt go there, and
> wanting to. spike
What do you think is the basis for that mysterious crush? It's just
molecules in motion. Altered mind states are essentially trivial to
achieve once you have your brute force upload in the box. This is your
brain on AR, and all that.
-- Eugen* Leitl leitl
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