From: Phil Osborn (philosborn@altavista.com)
Date: Wed Nov 28 2001 - 21:50:50 MST
Some possible contents to posthuman language: concepts of consciousness based on kinds of processing not possible or practical at mere human levels of intellect. E.g., suppose you could mentally record events in 3D visual+ res over a wider spectrum and with polarity awareness. Suppose you could go back to any such recording and play it back from a different perspective or follow different sets of actors or events?
Suppose you could create an internal simulacra - like a waking dream - of many different scenarios and plug different assumptions into them to see what might happen? Suppose you could do this sort of thing millions of times all at once? Suppose you could endow internal actors with transhuman intelligence and place them in these scenarios? Maybe you might want to train subsystems of your own consciousness, so you build neural training systems internally on the fly... Maybe you want the harshest critic imaginable to keep you sane, so you build your own evil twin and turn it loose to gnaw at your vitals.
We can talk about these kinds of plausible post-human capabilities, and even speculate upon what kinds of mental vocabulary might be required to deal with them, but we can never actually experience anything really like what the reality will be. Our own vocabulary of consciousness is itself extraordinarilly primitive.
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