Well...yeah, I was. I thought the whole idea of having an encyclopedia was to eliminate redundancy through standardization of the parts of the brain that were not important for individuality?
If your husband and my husband, your omelette and my omelette, are all stored in the encyclopedia, it wouldn’t be a “off-the-shelf encyclopedia module” anymore. It would be an index containing individual people’s non-episodic knowledge. At that point, it’s just an index of partial uploads. We can’t standardize that encyclopedia to everyone: If the the thing that stores your omelette and your husband went around viewing my episodic reel and knowing all the personal stuff about my omelette and husband...that would be weird and the resulting being would be very confused (let alone if the entire human race was in there—I’m not sure how that would even work).
(Also, going back into the technical stuff, there may or may not be a solid dividing line between very old episodic memory and non-episodoc memory
Sure, if your omelette and my omelette are so distinct that there is no common data structure that can serve as a referent for both, and ditto for all the other people in the world, then the whole idea of an encyclopedia falls apart. But that doesn’t seem terribly likely to me.
Your concept of an omelette probably isn’t exactly isomorphic to mine, but there’s probably a parametrizable omelette data structure we can construct that, along with a handful of parameter settings for each individual, can capture everyone’s omelette. The parameter settings go in the representation of the individual; the omelette data structure goes in the encyclopedia.
And, in addition, there’s a bunch of individualizing episodic memory on top of that… memories of cooking particular omelettes, of learning to cook an omelette, of learning particular recipes, of that time what ought to have been an omelette turned into a black smear on the pan, etc. And each of those episodic memories refers to the shared omelette data structure, but is stored with and is unique to the uploaded agent. (Maybe. It may turn out that our individual episodic memories have a lot in common as well, such that we can store a standard lifetime’s memories in the shared encyclopedia and just store a few million bits of parameter settings in each individual profile. I suspect we overestimate how unique our personal narratives are, honestly.)
Similarly, it may be that our relationships with our husbands are so distinct that there is no common data structure that can serve as a referent for both. But that doesn’t seem terribly likely to me. Your relationship with your husband isn’t exactly isomorphic to mine, of course, but it can likely similarly be captured by a common parameterizable relationship-to-husband data structure.
As for the actual individual who happens to be my husband, well, the majority of the information about him is common to all kinds of relationships with any number of people. He is his father’s son and his stepmother’s stepson and my mom’s son-in-law and so on and so forth. And, sure, each of those people knows different things, but they know those things about the same person; there is a central core. That core goes in the encyclopedia, and pointers to what subset each person knows about him goes in their individual profiles (along with their personal experiences and whatever idiosyncratic beliefs they have about him).
So, yes, I would say that your husband and my husband and your omelette and my omelette are all stored in the encyclopedia. You can call that an index of partial uploads if you like, but it fails to incorporate whatever additional computations that create first-person experience. It’s just a passive data structure.
Incidentally and unrelatedly, I’m not nearly as committed as you sound to preserving our current ignorance of one another’s perspective in this new architecture.
I’m really skeptical that parametric functions which vary on dimensions concerning omelets (Egg species? Color? ingredients? How does this even work?) are a more efficient or more accurate way of preserving what our wetware encode when compared to simulating the neural networks devoted dealing with omelettes. I wouldn’t even know how to start working on the problem mapping a conceptual representation of an omelette into parametric functions (unless we’re just using the parametric functions to model the properties of individual neurons—that’s fine).
Can you give an example concerning what sort of dimension you would parametrize so I have a better idea of what you mean?
Incidentally and unrelatedly, I’m not nearly as committed as you sound to preserving our current ignorance of one another’s perspective in this new architecture.
I was more worried that it might break stuff (as in, resulting beings would need to be built quite differently in order to function) if one-another’s perspectives would overlap. Also, that brings us back to the original question I was raising about living forever—what exactly is it that we value and want to preserve?
Can you give an example concerning what sort of dimension you would parametrize so I have a better idea of what you mean?
Not really. If I were serious about implementing this, I would start collecting distinct instances of omelette-concepts and analyzing them for variation, but I’m not going to do that. My expectation is that if I did, the most useful dimensions of variability would not map to any attributes that we would ordinarily think of or have English words for.
Perhaps what I have in mind can be said more clearly this way: there’s a certain amount of information that picks out the space of all human omelette-concepts from the space of all possible concepts… call that bitstring S1. There’s a certain amount of information that picks out the space of my omelette-concept from the space of all human omelette-concepts… call that bitstring S2.
S2 is much, much, shorter than S1.
It’s inefficient to have 7 billion human minds each of which is taking up valuable bits storing 7 billion copies of S1 along with their individual S2s. Why in the world would we do that, positing an architecture that didn’t physically require it? Run a bloody compression algorithm, store S1 somewhere, have each human mind refer to it.
I have no idea what S1 or S2 are.
And I don’t expect that they’re expressible in words, any more than I can express which pieces of a movie are stored as indexed substrings… it’s not like MPEG compression of a movie of an auto race creates an indexed “car” data structure with parameters representing color, make, model, etc. It just identifies repeated substrings and indexes them, and takes advantage of the fact that sequential frames share many substrings in common if properly parsed.
But I’m committed enough to a computational model of human concept storage that I believe they exist. (Of course, it’s possible that our concept-space of an omelette simply can’t be picked out by a bit-string, but I can’t see why I should take that possibility seriously.)
Oh, and agreed that we would change if we were capable of sharing one another’s perspectives. I’m not particularly interested in preserving my current cognitive isolation from other humans, though… I value it, but I value it less than I value the ability to easily share perspectives, and they seem to be opposed values.
Well...yeah, I was. I thought the whole idea of having an encyclopedia was to eliminate redundancy through standardization of the parts of the brain that were not important for individuality?
If your husband and my husband, your omelette and my omelette, are all stored in the encyclopedia, it wouldn’t be a “off-the-shelf encyclopedia module” anymore. It would be an index containing individual people’s non-episodic knowledge. At that point, it’s just an index of partial uploads. We can’t standardize that encyclopedia to everyone: If the the thing that stores your omelette and your husband went around viewing my episodic reel and knowing all the personal stuff about my omelette and husband...that would be weird and the resulting being would be very confused (let alone if the entire human race was in there—I’m not sure how that would even work).
(Also, going back into the technical stuff, there may or may not be a solid dividing line between very old episodic memory and non-episodoc memory
Sure, if your omelette and my omelette are so distinct that there is no common data structure that can serve as a referent for both, and ditto for all the other people in the world, then the whole idea of an encyclopedia falls apart. But that doesn’t seem terribly likely to me.
Your concept of an omelette probably isn’t exactly isomorphic to mine, but there’s probably a parametrizable omelette data structure we can construct that, along with a handful of parameter settings for each individual, can capture everyone’s omelette. The parameter settings go in the representation of the individual; the omelette data structure goes in the encyclopedia.
And, in addition, there’s a bunch of individualizing episodic memory on top of that… memories of cooking particular omelettes, of learning to cook an omelette, of learning particular recipes, of that time what ought to have been an omelette turned into a black smear on the pan, etc. And each of those episodic memories refers to the shared omelette data structure, but is stored with and is unique to the uploaded agent. (Maybe. It may turn out that our individual episodic memories have a lot in common as well, such that we can store a standard lifetime’s memories in the shared encyclopedia and just store a few million bits of parameter settings in each individual profile. I suspect we overestimate how unique our personal narratives are, honestly.)
Similarly, it may be that our relationships with our husbands are so distinct that there is no common data structure that can serve as a referent for both. But that doesn’t seem terribly likely to me. Your relationship with your husband isn’t exactly isomorphic to mine, of course, but it can likely similarly be captured by a common parameterizable relationship-to-husband data structure.
As for the actual individual who happens to be my husband, well, the majority of the information about him is common to all kinds of relationships with any number of people. He is his father’s son and his stepmother’s stepson and my mom’s son-in-law and so on and so forth. And, sure, each of those people knows different things, but they know those things about the same person; there is a central core. That core goes in the encyclopedia, and pointers to what subset each person knows about him goes in their individual profiles (along with their personal experiences and whatever idiosyncratic beliefs they have about him).
So, yes, I would say that your husband and my husband and your omelette and my omelette are all stored in the encyclopedia. You can call that an index of partial uploads if you like, but it fails to incorporate whatever additional computations that create first-person experience. It’s just a passive data structure.
Incidentally and unrelatedly, I’m not nearly as committed as you sound to preserving our current ignorance of one another’s perspective in this new architecture.
I’m really skeptical that parametric functions which vary on dimensions concerning omelets (Egg species? Color? ingredients? How does this even work?) are a more efficient or more accurate way of preserving what our wetware encode when compared to simulating the neural networks devoted dealing with omelettes. I wouldn’t even know how to start working on the problem mapping a conceptual representation of an omelette into parametric functions (unless we’re just using the parametric functions to model the properties of individual neurons—that’s fine).
Can you give an example concerning what sort of dimension you would parametrize so I have a better idea of what you mean?
I was more worried that it might break stuff (as in, resulting beings would need to be built quite differently in order to function) if one-another’s perspectives would overlap. Also, that brings us back to the original question I was raising about living forever—what exactly is it that we value and want to preserve?
Not really. If I were serious about implementing this, I would start collecting distinct instances of omelette-concepts and analyzing them for variation, but I’m not going to do that. My expectation is that if I did, the most useful dimensions of variability would not map to any attributes that we would ordinarily think of or have English words for.
Perhaps what I have in mind can be said more clearly this way: there’s a certain amount of information that picks out the space of all human omelette-concepts from the space of all possible concepts… call that bitstring S1. There’s a certain amount of information that picks out the space of my omelette-concept from the space of all human omelette-concepts… call that bitstring S2.
S2 is much, much, shorter than S1.
It’s inefficient to have 7 billion human minds each of which is taking up valuable bits storing 7 billion copies of S1 along with their individual S2s. Why in the world would we do that, positing an architecture that didn’t physically require it? Run a bloody compression algorithm, store S1 somewhere, have each human mind refer to it.
I have no idea what S1 or S2 are.
And I don’t expect that they’re expressible in words, any more than I can express which pieces of a movie are stored as indexed substrings… it’s not like MPEG compression of a movie of an auto race creates an indexed “car” data structure with parameters representing color, make, model, etc. It just identifies repeated substrings and indexes them, and takes advantage of the fact that sequential frames share many substrings in common if properly parsed.
But I’m committed enough to a computational model of human concept storage that I believe they exist. (Of course, it’s possible that our concept-space of an omelette simply can’t be picked out by a bit-string, but I can’t see why I should take that possibility seriously.)
Oh, and agreed that we would change if we were capable of sharing one another’s perspectives.
I’m not particularly interested in preserving my current cognitive isolation from other humans, though… I value it, but I value it less than I value the ability to easily share perspectives, and they seem to be opposed values.