From: Chris Hind (chind@juno.com)
Date: Tue Oct 29 1996 - 21:54:09 MST
>Seen any nano recently? Noticed some megaengineering? I shouldn't be
>sarcastic, but we are very far from the judeo-christian god.
Thats ok. Be as sarcastic as you like. I _rarely_ take things personally.
>And yes, you would need super-AI to create life with nano, either as a
>part of yourself or as your designer. It is not trivial at all (just look
>at any book on cell biology). Creating good artificial life in virtual
>reality is hard enough.
You don't think we will build tools powerful enough or find shortcuts
around needing an SI to do the tasks such as smart tools like windows95
'wizards' where the designer would just design the properties of the
animal/plant they liked and the 'wizard' would fill in the blanks er organs
to make the animal work. You need not render the entire animal just like
with a virtual human you would need only to entirely process the brain but
you can take shortcuts with the body due to the lack of need for internal
organs. It's the same thing as rendering computer graphics in realtime with
polygons instead of the time and processing intensive task of rendering the
computer graphics pixel by pixel with complex algorithms.
>These personalities does not work in parallel, instead they seem to be
>different metastable "attractors" of the brain. The person shifts between
>them (and they can be extremely different - there are even differences in
>their sensory evolked potentials!), but when a personality isn't "used"
>it doesn't exist.
I watched a show on TV recently in which the girl referred to herself as
'we' all the time and called her four remaining personalities the 'troops'.
She could recieve messages from all four personalities at once or so it
seemed. Can any cases of MP disorder share data between personalities? I've
also heard about personalities writing to other personalities by writing
letters to each other. Is there more than one form of this disorder?
>But we have plenty of other multitask power in our
>unconscious mind.
Well this solves our problem as to where multitasking power can come from
for background creative tasks.
>I was talking about running them. Let's say I want to create a cellular
>automaton universe (the Autoverse) with roughly the same internal size and
>complexity as the solar system. Assume we use clever compression so we
>only have to deal with the places where matter exists, then we have around
>10^31 kg of virtual matter, containing around 10^23 "atoms" each - 10^54
>bits for the whole simulation. This simulation will not run in a computer
>smaller than a star unless we can find some very clever optimizations...
Do we really need to animate all the atoms which don't currently serve any
practical use? We can simply suspend all atoms except for the ones which
we're using and as the virtual cities grow and size and complexity of the
universe grows, so will the processing power.
>No, you will at best become something close to a greek god - powerful,
>knowledgeable, immortal and able to change yourself and the world. But you
>are still not the least bit transcendent, omniscient, omnipotent or
>omnipresent.
>
>The sum of human knowledge sounds nice. But I want more.
I completely agree! More is better but do we even know what more is yet?
You're looking for quantity which is 'more' but we don't even know what
awesome technologies are going to flow out of that great expanse of 'more'.
I want quality as well as quantity and currently I'm focusing on quality so
being a greek god will do me just fine until I'm there and can see better
stuff coming down the tube. MUHAHAHAHA CREATE AND DESTROY AI CIVILIZATIONS
AT MY WHIM! (please excuse the short power trip) The whole concept of
uploading reminds me of Aladdin where Jafar becomes the genie (ie. The
universe is mine to command! to control!) Just hope humans left behind
don't destroy our magic lamp!
>But you could of course simply halt them until the necessary technology
>arrives. Instant (forward) timetravel.
You could make the years of waiting appear to you as seconds as well as you
wouldn't realize internet lag or slow updating of the virtual world because
from your vantage point it would appear normal due to your mind slowing
down with the virtual world.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:35:48 MST