Re: Uploading

From: Richard Steven Hack (richardhack@pcmagic.net)
Date: Sat Mar 09 2002 - 09:13:07 MST


At 03:42 PM 3/9/02 +0100, you wrote:

>On Sat, 9 Mar 2002, Samantha Atkins wrote:
>
> > Dunno. Ask me when we get anywhere close to the supposed limits . The
>
>We're traversing a sequence of kinetic bottlenecks in our development.
>Right now they're technologically artefacted, but passing through each of
>them brings us closer and closer to the hard limits of physical reality.
>
>Given what we know, absolute hard limits are given by amount of energy and
>matter in the local solar system (anything else doesn't matter, as the
>creation rate in a given volume soon outstrips transport rate through a
>crossection, i.e. sufficiently large volumes are effectively isolated).
>Before we reach them, we will have a period whether bit beings can
>multiply faster than matter can be restructured into habitats (ms vs. hour
>and day range). Depending on the level of technology, it can take hundreds
>to thousands years to bring our local system to the hard limit.

Once again, we're assuming the speed of light is an absolute limit. That
may be true given current scientific knowledge, but that is not the same as
being an absolute.

> > "rat race" only makes sense if there is no way to better the
> > fundamentals of your condition beyond that of rats or of much more
>
>Last time I looked no one has found a way to strip Darwin in context of
>self replication.

A Transhuman has no need to replicate. Now, it is possible that it may
turn out that replication is a good move for some other reason, but
replication is not identity (barring some tech that enables it to be
identity), therefore replication offers no survival advantage to an entity
bounded by space-time.

> > in-your-face scarcity. It pays not to mistake current context for laws
> > of reality.
>
>Please show me a mechanism by which you're supposed to get out of
>darwinian evolution sustainably. Proposing Eden without a mechanism how to
>get there and to stay there is not scientific.

As I say above, replication is not the issue. It is not clear that
Transhumans need be competitive - that is *human* thinking (and low-grade
human thinking at that).

Richard Steven Hack
richardhack@pcmagic.net


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