I think the suit definitely counts as human augmentation. Plus, he designs his augmentations himself. Captain America just used the technology of some guy who then promptly proceeded to die, making the process unrepeatable for some reason. Stark is constantly refining his stuff.
Dolores1984
Karma: 809
The obvious counter-example is iron man, especially in the films.
Simply to replicate one of the 10,000 neuron brain cells involved in the rat experiment took the processing capacity usually found in a single laptop.
Good lord, what sort of neuron model are they running? There had got to be a way to optimize that.
Your four criteria leave an infinite set of explanations for any phenomenon. Including, yes, George the Giant. That’s why we have the idea of Occam’s razor—or, more formally, Solomonoff Induction. Though I suppose, depending on the data available to the tribe, the idea of giant humans might not be dramatically more complicated than plate tectonics. It isn’t like they postulated a god of earthquakes or some nonsense like that. At minimum, however, they are privileging the George the Giant hypotheses over the other equally-complicated plausible explanations. The real truth is that they don’t have enough data to come up with the real answers. They need to start recording data and studying the natural world. They can probably figure it out in a few hundred years if they really put their backs into it.
When we try to build a model of the underlying universe, what we’re really talking about it is trying to derive properties of a program which we are observing (and a component of), and which produces our sense experiences. Probably quite a short program in its initial state, in fact (though possibly not one limited by the finite precision of traditional Turing Machines).
So, that gives us a few rules that seem likely to be general: the underlying model must be internally consistent and mathematically describable, and must have a total K-complexity less than the amount of information in the observable universe (or else we couldn’t reason about it).
So the question to ask is really “can I imagine a program state that would make this proposition true, given my current beliefs about my organization of the program?”
This is resilient to the atoms / QM thing, at least, as you can always change the underlying program description to better fit the evidence.
Although, in practice, most of what intelligent entities do can more precisely be described as ‘grammar fitting’ than ‘program induction.’ We reason probabalistically, essentially by throwing heuristics at a wall to see what offers marginal returns on predicting future sense impressions, since trying to guess the next word in a sentence by reverse-deriving the original state of the universe-program and iterating it forwards is not practical for most people. That massive mess of semi-rational, anticipatorially-justified rules of thumb is what allows us to reason in the day to day.
So a more pragmatic question is ‘how does this change my anticipation of future events?’ or ‘What sense experiences do I expect to have differently as a result of this belief?’
It is only when we seek to understand more deeply and generally, or when dealing with problems of things not directly observable, that it is practical to try to reason about the actual program underlying the universe.
Most of the sensible people seem to be saying that the relevant neural features can be observed at a 5nm x 5nm x 5nm spatial resolution, if supplemented with some gross immunostaining to record specific gene expressions and chemical concentrations. We already have SEM setups that can scan vitrified tissue at around that resolution, they’re just (several) orders of magnitude too slow. Outfitting them to do immunostaining and optical scanning would be relatively trivial. Since multi-beam SEMS are expected to dramatically increase the scan rate in the next couple of years, and since you could get excellent economies of scale for scanning on parallel machines, I do not expect the scanners themselves to be the bottleneck technology.
The other possible bottleneck is the actual neuroscience, since we’ve got a number of blind spots in the details of how large-scale neural machinery operates. We don’t know all the factors we would need to stain for, we don’t know all of the details of how synaptic morphology correlates with statistical behavior, and we don’t know how much detail we need in our neural models to preserve the integrity of the whole (though we have some solid guesses). We also do not, to the best of my knowledge, have reliable computational models of glial cells at this point. There are also a few factors of questionable importance, like passive neurotransmitter diffusion and electrical induction that need further study to decide how (if at all) to account for them in our models. However, progress in this area is very rapid. The Blue Brain project alone has made extremely strong progress in just a few years. I would be surprised if it took more than fifteen years to solve the remaining open questions.
Large scale image processing and data analytics, for parsing the scan images, is a sufficiently mature science that it’s not my primary point of concern. What could really screw it up is if Moore’s law craps out in ten years like Gordon Moore has predicted, and none of the replacement technologies are advanced enough to pick up the slack.
Additionally, reality and virtual reality can get a lot fuzzier than that. If AR glasses become popular, and a protocol exists to swap information between them to allow more seamless AR content integration, you could grab all the feeds coming in from a given location, reconstruct them into a virtual environment, and insert yourself into that environment, which would update with the real world in real time. People wearing glasses could see you as though you were there, and vice versa. If you rented a telepresence robot, it would prevent people from walking through you, and allow you to manipulate objects, shake hands, that sort of thing. The robot would simply be replaced by a rendering of you in the glasses. Furthermore, you could step from that real environment seamlessly into an entirely artificial environment, and back again, and overlay virtual content onto the real world. I suspect that in the next twenty years, the line between reality and virtual reality is going to get really fuzzy, even for non-uploads.
If you’re talking about people frozen after four plus hours of room temperature ischemia, I’d agree with you that the odds are not good. However, somebody with a standby team, perfused before ischemic clotting can set in and vitrified quickly, has a very good chance in my book. We’ve done SEM imaging of optimally vitrified dead tissue, and the structural preservation is extremely good. You can go in and count the pores on a dendrite. There simply isn’t much information lost immediately after death, especially if you get the head in ice water quickly.
I also have quite a high confidence that we’ll be seeing WBE technology in the next forty years (I’d wager at better than even odds that we’ll see it in the next twenty). The component technologies already exist (and need only iterative improvements), and many of them are falling exponentially in cost. That combined with what I suspect will be a rather high demand when the potential reaches the public consciousness, is a pretty potent combination of forces.
So, for me, I lose most of my probability mass to the idea that, if you’re vitrified now, something will happen to Alcor within 40 years, or, more generally, some civilization-disrupting event will occur in the same time frame. That your brain isn’t preserved (under optimal conditions), or that we’ll never figure out how to slice up and emulate a brain, are not serious points of concern to me.
The words “one of the things that creates bonds” should have been a big hint that I think there’s more to friendship than that. Why did you suddenly start wondering if I’m a sociopath? That seems paranoid, or it suggests that I did something unexpected.
Well, then there’s your answer to the question ‘what is friendship good for’ - whatever other value you place on friendship that makes you neurotypical. I was just trying to point out that that line of reasoning was silly.
Okay, but the reason why rationality has a special ability to help you get more of what you want is because it puts you in touch with reality. Only when you’re in touch with reality can you understand it enough to make reality do things you want. In a simulation, you don’t need to know the rules of reality, or how to tell the difference between true and false. You can just press a button and make the sun revolve around the earth, turn off laws of physics like gravity, or cause all the calculators to do 1+1 = 3. In a virtual world where you can get whatever you want by pressing a button, what value would rationality have?
Well, you have to get to that point, for starters. And, yes, you do need some level of involvement with top-level reality. To pay for your server space, if nothing else. Virtual environments permit a big subset of life (play, communication, learning, etc. much more efficiently than real life), with a few of the really horrifying sharp edges rounded off, and some additional possibilities added.
There are still challenges to that sort of living, both those imposed by yourself, and those imposed by ideas you encounter and by your interactions with other people. Rationality still has value, for overcoming these sorts of obstacles, even if you’re not in imminent danger of dying all the time.
Well, there’s no reason to think you’d be completely isolated from top level reality. Internet access is very probable. Likely the ability to rent physical bodies. Make phone calls. That sort of thing. You could still get involved in most of the ways you do now. You could talk to people about it, get a job and donate money to various causes. Sign contracts, make legal arrangements to keep yourself safe. That sort of thing.
With friendship, one of the things that creates bonds is knowing that if I’m in trouble at 3:00 am, I can call my friend. If all the problems are happening in a world that neither of you has access to, if you’re stuck inside a great big game where nothing can hurt you for real, what basis is there for friendship? What would companionship be good for?
Wait, you only value friendship in so far as it directly aids you? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if that’s actually true, then you might be a sociopath.
Why are you learning rationality if you don’t see value in influencing reality?
Rationality is about maximizing your values. I happen to think that most of my values can be most effectively fulfilled in a virtual environment. If the majority of humanity winds up voluntarily living inside a comfortable, interesting, social, novel Matrix environment, I don’t think that’s a bad future. It would certainly solve the over-crowding problem, for quite a while at least.
I want meaning, this requires having access to reality. I’ll think about it.
Does it? You can have other people in the simulation with you. People find a lot of meaning in companionship, even digitally mediated. People don’t think a conversation with your mother is meaningless because it happens over VOIP. You could have lots of places to explore. Works of art.. Things to learn. All meaningful things. You could play with the laws of physics. Find out what if feels like to turn gravity off one day and drift out of your apartment window.
If you wake up one morning in your house, go make a cup of coffee, breathe the fresh morning air, and go for a walk in the park, does it really matter if the park doesn’t really exist? How much of your actual enjoyment of the process derives from the knowledge that the park is ‘real’? It’s not something I normally even consider.
Awful! That’s experimenting on a person against their will, and without their knowledge, even! I sure hope people like you don’t start freezing people like me in the event that I decide against cryo...
-shrug- so don’t leave your brain to science. I figure if somebody is prepared to let their brain decompose on a table while first year medical students poke at it, you might as well try to save their life. Provided, of course, the laws wherever you are permit you to put the results down if they’re horrible. Worst case, they’re back where they started.
People experience this every day. It’s called chemical depression. Even if you don’t currently see a way for preservation or revival technology to cause this condition, it exists, it’s possible that more than one mechanism may exist to trigger it, and that these technologies may have that as an accidental side-effect.
Chemical depression is not ‘absolute misery.’ Besides, we know how to treat that now. That we’ll be able to bring you back, but unable to tweak your brain activity a little is not very credible. Worst case, once we have the scan, we can always put it back on ice for another decade or two until we can fix the problem.
Uh… no, because I’d be experiencing life, I would just be without what makes me me. That would be horror, not non-existence. So it is not death.
If I took a bunch of Drexler-class nanotech, took your brain, and restructured its material to be a perfect replica of my brain, that would be murder. You would cease to exist. The person living in your head would be me, not you. If brain damage is adequately severe, then you don’t exist any more. The ‘thing that makes you you’ is necessary to ‘do the experiencing.’
Depends on your definition of ‘you.’ Mine are pretty broad. The way I see it, my only causal link to myself of yesterday is that I remember being him. I can’t prove we’re made of the same matter. Under quantum mechanics, that isn’t even a coherent concept. So, if I believe that I didn’t die in the night, then I must accept that that’s a form of survival.
Uploaded copies of you are still ‘you’ in the sense that the you of tomorrow is you. I can talk about myself tomorrow, and believe that he’s me (and his existence guarantees my survival), even though if he were teleported back in time to now, we would not share a single thread of conscious experience. I can also consider different possibilities tomorrow. I could go to class, or I could go to the store. Both of those hypothetical people are still me, but they are not quite exactly each other.
So, to make a long story short, yes: if an adequately detailed model is made of my brain, then I consider that to be survival. I don’t want bad things to happen to future me’s.
Remember: you can always take random recently dead guys who donated their bodies to science, vitrify their brains, and experiment on them. And this’ll be after years of animal studies and such.
You are overwhelmingly likely not to wake up in a body, depending on the details of your instructions to Alcor.. Scanning a frozen brain is exponentially cheaper and technologically easier than trying to repair every cell in your body. You will almost certainly wake up as a computer program running on server somewhere.
This is not a bad thing. Your computer program can be plugged into software body models in convincing virtual environments, permitting normal human activities (companionship, art, fun, sex, etc.), plus some activities not normally possible for humans. It’ll likely be possible to rent mechanical bodies for interacting with the physical world.
There’s no reason to experiment o cryo patients. Lots of people donate their brains to science. Grab somebody who isn’t expecting to be resurrected, and test your technology on them. Worst case, you wake up somebody who doesn’t want to be alive, and they kill themselves.
Number two is very unlikely. We’re basically talking brain damage, and I’ve never heard of a case of brain damage, no matter how severe, doing that.
As for number three, that shambling horror would not be you in a meaningful sense. You’d just be dead, which is the default case. Also, I have my doubts that they’d even bother to try to resurrect you with that much damage if they didn’t already have a way of patching the gaps in your neurology.
As for number four, depending on the degree of the disability, suicide or euthanasia is probably possible. Besides, I think it’s unlikely they’ll be able to drag you back from being a corpsicle without being able to fix problems like that.
Really? I wouldn’t put odds of revival for best-case practices any lower than maybe 10%. How on earth do you have such a high confidence that WBE emulation won’t be perfected in the next couple of hundred years?
Living forever isn’t quite impossible. If we ever develop acausal computing, or a way to beat the first law of thermodynamics (AND the universe turns out to be spatially infinite), then it’s possible that a sufficiently powerful mind could construct a mathematical system containing representations of all our minds that it could formally prove would keep us existent and value-fulfilled forever, and then just… run it.
Not very likely, though. In the mean time, more life is definitely better than less.
If you’re revived via whole brain emulation (dramatically easier, and thus more likely, than trying to convert a hundred kilos of flaccid, poisoned cell edifices into a living person), then you could easily be prevented from killing yourself.
That said, whole brain emulation ought to be experimentally feasible, in what, fifteen years? At a consumer price point in 40? (Assuming the general trend of Moore’s law stays constant). That’s little enough time that I think the probability of such a dytopian future is not incredibly large. Especially since Alcor et all can move around if the laws start to get draconian. So it doesn’t just require an evil empire—it requires a global evil empire.
The real risk is that Alcor will fold before that happens, and (for some reason) won’t plastinate the brains they have on ice. In which case, you’re back in the same boat you started in.
How about a cyborg whose arm unscrews? Is he not augmented? Most of a cochlear implant can be removed. Nothing about trans-humanism says your augmentations have to be permanently attached to your body. You need only want to improve yourself and your abilities, which a robot suit of that caliber definitely accomplishes.
And, yes, obviously transhumanism is defined relative to historical context. If everyone’s doing it, you don’t need to have a word for it. That we have a word implies that transhumanists are looking ahead, and looking for things that not everyone has yet. So, no, your car doesn’t make you a trans-humanist, but a robotic exoskeleton might be evidence of that philosophy.