Is this The end of Humanity

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conny
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Post by conny » Mon May 30, 2005 12:59 am

About canning consciousness etc.
A book label "Descartes' mistake" or something similar has good arguments to conclude that thought, feelings etc all have there counterpart in what may be called a mental duplicate of the body.
Without further arguments I must say that "mind" never will be just electricity.
Imagine a human feeling and thinking and remebering. That is not just "thoughts". It also a floods av hormones, muscle tensions, perception of you body status and the environment, heartbeats and... In short: A thought is in no way separable from the mind or the body or the world or the history or the universe.
Well, in an abstract way - yes. But that's not what we are talking about here. We already have book to do the abstraction of lives and thoughts and feelings. Or maybe it is, because a papyrus is still a much better canned consciousness then any AI replica will be.
Why?
Because it was written with all the human parts and circumstances and it is read by all human parts and circumstances.

// C
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Diskclaimer
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Post by Diskclaimer » Mon May 30, 2005 1:14 am

MrYellow wrote:All this talk of "but it's won't be me, it will be different from me" is really a
mute point.... If you copied yourself, and a version of you went on evolving
throughout the ages.... This would be immortality. In the same way
Gilgamesh writting of his exploits in the bricks of his cities walls was.

You don't have to actually be alive to be immortal :-)

Another angle that hasn't been hit on here..... What about keeping your
brain alive..... Using stem cells to regenerate it while machines filter your
blood and mix it with nutrients, enzimes, etc etc.

-Ben

I think we are all immortal right now in this moment

conny
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Post by conny » Mon May 30, 2005 1:25 am

Diskclaimer wrote: I think we are all immortal right now in this moment
That's it.
That's life in all its beauty under the shadow of death.

// C
PC Laptop Acer, XP Home SP2, build in crappy sound card.
Bleeps and Blops!
http://bluemoose.greatnow.com/

Alexis Forge
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Post by Alexis Forge » Thu Apr 17, 2008 12:21 pm

I have no idea even how I found this thread, but what a gem.

I was looking for somethign totally different, but it reminded me of a cool form of creative tangent making - this forum is by now a quite huge archive and there are some fantastic thoughts in it - sometimes it is a lot of fun to just enter some kind of random word or sentence in the search engine and see what comes up...

andydes
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Post by andydes » Thu Apr 17, 2008 12:51 pm

Alexis Forge wrote:I have no idea even how I found this thread, but what a gem.

I was looking for somethign totally different, but it reminded me of a cool form of creative tangent making - this forum is by now a quite huge archive and there are some fantastic thoughts in it - sometimes it is a lot of fun to just enter some kind of random word or sentence in the search engine and see what comes up...
I just tried seaching for tea bagging and found 372 matches. You guys make me sick.

Or maybe the search engine really is as rubbish as people say it is.

Can't really be bothered to read all the way through this post though. Just skipped to the end to see who nercobumped it.

kb420
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Post by kb420 » Thu Apr 17, 2008 3:14 pm

louZ wrote:Great, Playstations will take over the world 8O
It happened in The Matrix and The Terminator!
"That which does not kill us makes us stronger..........."
-Friedrich Nietzsche-

friend_kami
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Re: Is this The end of Humanity

Post by friend_kami » Fri Apr 25, 2008 10:58 am

Emissary wrote:This must be stopped!! its fucked up
---------------------------------------------------


David Smith, technology correspondent
Sunday May 22, 2005
The Observer

Aeroplanes will be too afraid to crash, yoghurts will wish you good morning
before being eaten and human consciousness will be stored on supercomputers,
promising immortality for all - though it will help to be rich.

These fantastic claims are not made by a science fiction writer or a crystal
ball-gazing lunatic. They are the deadly earnest predictions of Ian Pearson,
head of the futurology unit at British Telecom.

'If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able
to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it's not a major
career problem,' Pearson told The Observer. 'If you're rich enough then by
2050 it's feasible. If you're poor you'll probably have to wait until 2075
or 2080 when it's routine. We are very serious about it. That's how fast
this technology is moving: 45 years is a hell of a long time in IT.'

He believes that today's youngsters may never have to die, and points to the
rapid advances in computing power demonstrated last week, when Sony released
the first details of its PlayStation 3. It is 35 times more powerful than
previous games consoles. 'The new PlayStation is 1 per cent as powerful as a
human brain,' he said. 'It is into supercomputer status compared to 10 years
ago. PlayStation 5 will probably be as powerful as the human brain...'
yeah well, we should have flying cars and housing on the moon by now, still we got squat.

snowtires
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Post by snowtires » Fri Apr 25, 2008 6:59 pm

tell you what, if i die before this happens, i am gonna be bummed. i hope they name the computer system that's able to do this 'jesus' or 'the christ' or something.

Khazul
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Post by Khazul » Fri Apr 25, 2008 8:05 pm

Personally I quite like the idea of downloading, or at least semi-downloading....

Controlling systems, particularly synths etc fro within without the constraints of a phsyical body and associated crud user interfaces.

All that shit we all sequence? Think if you could just play it all in real time - every note or drum hit etc along with a real time mixing.

As for a total download - given a choice between ceasing to be and having a continuing thinking and experiencing me forever - I would like to be around forever, but only if I could continue to experience the world in some meaningful way and all it has to offer. Besides, Im kind of curious as to how the next 1000 years will play out and how we will develop as a species and as a community. Will we ever make it to the stars etc?

If a total download is the only way to stick around to witness it all - then so be it - at some time in the future, maybe redownloading back into an organic form may become possible again...

Heres the crux though - how would you sustain yourself in a virtual world? You see in the real world you cant simply be copied, sure you ideas can etc, but you cant be. In the virtual world, if I want to steal something that you have thought of - hell - I just steal and re=program a bit of 'you' so hat you do whatever it is you do, for me instead - a mind in captivity. In a matrix of our making.


Perhaps the future wont be so different to the corporate world of today. Today we get a few hour and a weekend etc where we can be ourselves instead of corporate droids at least.
Nothing to see here - move along!

luv2spin31
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Post by luv2spin31 » Sat Apr 26, 2008 12:48 am

montrealbreaks wrote:Man - if I could live forever I would do it! Not being a religious fellow (I believe that after death there's nothing in particular) the prospect of something like that is quite attractive to me - and I would pay dearly for the opportunity to "download" myself and live forever...

Not a doubt in my mind.
i am not a religious person also, but i wouldn't want to live forever. what for?

we all are going to die, people need to accept the inevitable, and live for the moment

as if it is your last.
"music is like photography. it's all in the rhythm of expression."

forge
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Post by forge » Sat Apr 26, 2008 1:12 am

thing is, I can't imagine that it would mean still experiencing life. The way I interpret it it would be more like backing up your memories and personality - so the computer system might be able to take a question or decision and run it, applying the conditions of your personality and experience to it and make an accurate replication of the decision you would have made, but the actual "I" or "ME" or "soul/spirit" ,if you like, wont ever be able to be downloaded. That would mean discovering the actual key to life - heading into frankenstein territory here and personally, based on my no-PHd-in-this-type-of-thing understanding of it I just won't believe that will ever be possible.

Angstrom
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Post by Angstrom » Sat Apr 26, 2008 1:24 am

luv2spin31 wrote: and live for the moment

as if it is your last.

bad plan that one.

If you live for the moment as if it is your last then you may find that the day after tomorrow you are skint and in a holding cell regretting that unfortunate tattoo.
There is too high a percentage chance that the day after tomorrow will find you alive and unwell. A different strategy is required.

I recommend my current philosophy :
Live like you have 5 years left to go.
Reason 1: you can actually decide what you really want to do with your remaining life, such as "become a pimp", "live in a mobile home", or whatever. If you only had a day then you would never attempt it, but with 5 years you can have a go at medium term nonsense with a measured degree of disregard for the law and common sense.

Reason 2: it's probably an over-estimate of your life-span anyway judging by how my friends are disappearing.

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