Avatar Polymorph graciously granted the Immortality Institute an indepth interview.
[Sept. 5th 2002]
BJKlein: COULD YOU TELL US ABOUT YOUR BACKGROUND, WHERE YOU GREW UP, AND A SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR FAMILY LIFE?
Avatar Polymorph: I was a science fiction kid from an early stage. I was into comics, revolutionary politics, sexual and societal revolutionary theory and worldscaping from the age of four on. My father was a political scientist -
his family included several some major Australia politicians - two Premiers,
the equivalent of American Governors, one of whom was a founding father of
Federation - and my mother a refugee from Lithuania and the post-War Soviet
occupation there. I grew up in Melbourne, Canberra - the capital of
Australia - and Adelaide. My sister is a legal publisher and editor and my
brother an engineer.
I have always had an intense interest in history and spirituality. Until I
read Drexler and Tipler I was searching for an underlying connective
explanation for our current phenomenological/ontological reality. As a
teenager my friends and I speculated about cosmic engineering. We read the
standards like Sagan and Dyson. I believed in extropian-allied notions of
understanding the universal laws around us as systems operation mechanisms
of one universe within a multiverse from around the age of six. At about the
age of four I remember having an intense yearning to get the hypothetical
fusion reactors described in Look and Learn books moving!
As an adult I've worked as a policy adviser for the Prime Minister and State
Premier and written a few published sf stories including The Prisoner Gains
a Blurred Skin (a collection). I've also written a few articles on the
Singularity and related issues, spoken on the radio a few times about it and
put out several thousand posters (mostly related to timeframes for
youth-treatments and self-replicating nanotech assemblers). Things became a
lot easier after Damien Broderick published The Spike. I even had a
demonstration in favor of making telomere therapies or other treatments
towards immortality freely available to all who requested such, which
happened about two months before the Spike was published! I was pretty ill
but about twenty people turned up on the steps of Parliament House with a
video camera. Damien actually published my first sf story in the 1980s.
After my book of fiction came out in 1994 I remember him asking me whether I
believed in a multiverse - he raised the issue. Like many other authors, he
dealt with allied notions in such works as The Judas Mandala.
WHAT SPARKED YOUR INTEREST IN TRANSHUMANISM AND DO YOU SOMETIMES FEEL THAT YOU'RE OUT OF THE LOOP IN THAT YOU ARE IN AUSTRALIA?
Transhumanism and extropian and Singularitarian thought were already present
even before I read specific information through the Internet. My
mystical-realist story The Prisoner Gains a Blurred Skin deals with the
emotional joy of purported quantum-like neurological interaction with a
galactic supermind which exists behind a form of Quarantine.
I've always had an interest in problem-solving, starting as a child, when I
wanted to find out if there was any way of preventing a negative-outcome
endverse scenario, whether through a Big Crunch or otherwise. I'd spend
hours at a time pondering this issue. The issue of somehow alleviating
unchosen individual death, present and past, for all sentient life roughly
defined was the secondary big issue for me as a kid. The 'unfairness' of it
all struck me just as it does many of the Immortality Institute's members.
Just reading Jack Kirby's The New Gods comics, despite their faint aura of juvenilia,
was enough to set me thinking, this is moving along the right tracks! This
interest in problem-solving continued after I was a government adviser in
the late 1980s. One reason I left that area was because I began to despair
at the inadequacy of government responses to obvious dumbness.
In the early 1980s I was constantly thinking about bootstrapping,
automation, modular and self-repairing systems, genetic therapies including
for adults and the issue of Artificial Intelligence. I thought of notions
such as providing a self-repairing balloon to hold in and protect any
generated Martian atmosphere. I wrote an sf novel which included a
supercomputer superintelligence distributed in broadcast-linked dust
throughout a planet. At that stage, being less mature, I had to consider the
fear of human irrelevance.
Without nanotechnological understanding, the debate was off-line. I did,
however, begin to realize that true superintelligence - one of my areas of
interest - would include human-level emotions and interactivity. When I was
at primary school I believed computers would one day beat humans at chess.
When I was at high school I believed cloning and laptops would soon be
possible. I knew linear accelerators in space and solar power in space would
be relevant later.
But I was missled about cryogenics revival prospects because of the
"thaw-out cell-rupture" theory. In those days - the late 70s - many
scientists claimed the processes of the cell's internal structures would be
beyond reach, always destroyed in the viewing. Now we are using lasers to
surgically manipulate genes directly. I also didn't understand that
self-replicating macro-automation would be difficult because of software
drag, visual-recognition drag and manipulation-systems drag. In the event,
we now understand that macro-automation suffers so much drag that it gets
bypassed by nanotech macro production, at least in the next two decades.
Also, I was still thinking in timeframes of one to three centuries for huge
change, though I knew that genetics and AI were supposed to start becoming
relevant in about 50 years.
I've always been into absolute logical confrontation with issues as a first
step. When I read Drexler and Tipler - and people such as Moravec
- I accepted most of their basic propositions. I think I first heard of the
Singularity in an article in 21st Century mag - including an interview with
Vinge - and via Anders Sandberg, and Sysop ideas integrated with my own.
Also, when I tried to measure the rate of change of the mid-point of the
Singularity I discovered that in addition to it appearing like a "wall" -
something Damien Broderick later pointed out in his book The Spike - that
the mid-point functioned in time like a mid-moment with a superlarge boost
in under a second. This I immediately assumed to be not just a hard take-off
but a hardest take-off to near-Tiplerian levels, by an AI with bush-robot
alike add-ons. I also assumed it to be related to contact with an existent
post-Singularity civilized network amidst the 50,000 billion trillion stars
in this universe.
That day was a big rush for me, only superceded by my earlier realization
that I fully believed in Drexler and Tipler - not that what they talk about
is necessarily exactly what happens, but that their theory is reasonable.
What a spin-out!
The biggest thing about Drexler and Tipler, though, was - with a few
modifications - the freedom of choice they brought with them. A bit like
Dyson, but stronger. This allowed me to feel like I could "let go" and
forgive and forget everything negative - which I had a natural inclination
to do anyhow. Sysop is good this way. Transhumanism can become the "way
around" problems in a fashion denied other methodologies of thought. It
doesn't solve all problems for everyone, but it solves the problems of lack
of choice for everyone!
Melbourne, Australia, is not out of the loop, any more than London. The
Internet connects us all. California is a nodal centre, to be sure. That's
why so much SF comes from there. Melbourne has Damien Broderick, Sean
McMullen and myself, to name a few. Australia also has Greg Egan and Paul
Davies. Our three major universities in Melbourne - Melbourne, La Trobe and
Monash - do cutting-edge work. Even in 1992, a theatre group - Cyber-Dada -
in Melbourne was distributing Dada-like leaflets on nanotech including
cell-level supercomputing/repair machines/drug machines in the midst of
their performance art - these people were a little in advance of Stelarc at
the time though he's now branching into VR.
Socially, of course - some may disagree - Melbourne is the leading
avant-garde city in the world, ahead of San Francisco and New York. For me
this "alternative" world is very important, as it is the living poetic
social fabric that has nurtured me in a crowded urban artistic framework of
young vibrant happy people - the sort that will flourish after the
self-replicating assemblers begin their merry work and free us from manual
labour!
COULD YOU TELL US A ABOUT YOUR CURRENT PHYSICAL CONDITION AND HAS THIS
HAMPERED OR IMPROVED YOUR RESOLVE TO PURSUE TRANSHUMANISTIC GOALS?
I had over six years of leukemia/bone marrow transplant/rejection problems.
That seems over now leaving me with some smaller problems, mainly lack of
tear glands, post-cataract plastic lenses and reduced numbers of saliva
glands and consequent dental problems. This has been irrelevant to my goals
which were in place a few months before my illness manifested. It is
ironical to think I've already had several generations of treatments and now
have two sets of dna and plastic bits in my eyes! When I was younger, in
1973, I read an sf novel about a being - a guy/girl/girl - with three bodies
and I've always had a sentimental attachment to experience this - maybe,
anyhow, we'll see! - and other more "impossible" things such as talking to
beings born in the ancient human world in Carthage and Rome and so on. Also
I've had a sentimental attachment - again first read of in sf works by
Stapledon, Lieber, Cordwainer Smith, Niven and Varley - to talk to boosted
superintelligent non-human mammals. Also virtuality such as in Neal
Stephenson has been an inspiration. I must admit however that the mental
effects of my medical treatment were an emotional problem since some
medications such as cyclosporin have a strong depressive effect and
cortisone-analgues interfere with memory. So leaving this behind and
recovering my natural emotional buoyancy - as an addition to my intellectual
faith, which never left - has been very positive.
IN YOUR BIOGRAPHY AT IMMINST.ORG YOU STATE THAT IN 1997 YOU DECLARED THAT THE TECHNO-RAPTURE WOULD BEGIN IN 2027 WHILE AT A PUBLIC CEREMONY BEFORE SEVERAL DOZEN PEOPLE AT DAWN AT THE SHRINE OF REMEMBRANCE IN MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA. COULD YOU TELL US A LITTLE MORE ABOUT WHAT THE "TECHNO-RAPTURE" IS AND DO YOU STILL BELIEVE IT WILL TAKE PLACE IN THE YEAR 2027?
Well I took the term T-R from Anders Sandberg where he called it the period
after the Singularity. Subsequently I realize I think he was really
obliquely referring to an American Protestant tradition of the Rapture, in
which Christians ascend to Heaven before the final events of the Christian
Book of Revelation. It has value however as a term for the post-Singularity.
It also remains true that Ascension in the Andersonian sense will happen.
The only question is whether it happens through a nanofog or quantum
engineering. The T-R will also undoubtedly include the animated dreams of
individuals and groups, some of whom will be neurologically linked, and this will
extend to any multiversal scenarios that arise. I still believe the T-R
begins in 2027. Nothing I have read or heard of has been off-line in
projected timeframes. The date derives from a number of sources, including
hypothetical mathematical population projections, Tipler, Drexler and the
logic of interaction between primitive nanotech, advanced - intelligent and
self-replicating - nanotech and the mid-moment of the Singularity. The
period between self-replicating nanotech and the Singularity is relatively
short though not instant because of social and cultural safeguards or
firewalls and lingering software drag. Bush-robot-akin capabilities, for
example, will be under cultural lock-and-key for a time.
COULD YOU TELL US MORE ABOUT YOUR CURRENT PROJECTS AND THE BOOK YOU'RE CURRENTLY WORKING ON?
I'm doing some minor rewriting of my spiritual book The Path of Love which
is about achieving detachment. In a sense it is not completely relevant as
to whether reality is computronium-based virtuality or multiversal
insert-generated or whatever, as long as the principles of choice which are
based on love and compassion for all sentient beings are ultimately
respected. The abolition of any non-consensual hells is the important thing,
along with the consensual option of dystopias for those who wish for it. One
area where Tipler is wrong is where he talks about leaving the "bad" or
"evil" people behind, abandoned by his Omega Point. It is enough to place
their potential non-consensual victims behind Sysop. In addition, I
personally believe it's important for myself to forgive them and move -
emotionally - beyond the past or their attitude. I see these people as
acting "incorrectly" more than being "evil" in some romantic or monotheistic
or Zoroastrian or chthonic sense. In practice, right now, I rarely encounter
great negativity but often encounter callousness or indifference.
In addition I'm working on a new collection of fiction, Ms Universe in the
9th Billenia, which is set in a universe similar to ours. How similar is a
matter for debate! Not exactly the same if you ask me, but it's fun and it's
fiction. It tries to explore some of the possibilities of a Post-Singularity
existence, where our rate of change of the last 10,000 to 300 to now years
is replaced by area-variant rates of change or stasis created consensually
within Sysop parameters. So in this universe, Earth is the only world with
life and the multiverse scenario is deferred for several billenia.
Virtuality acts as a partial substitute and different approaches are created
within the rules of Sysop and also the general operative mechanisms or laws
of this universe.
YOUR NAME!! HOW AND WHY DID YOU CHOOSE YOUR NAME "AVATAR POLYMORPH", AND DO YOU HAVE TO EXPLAIN YOURSELF EVERY TIME YOU GO TO THE BANK OR RENEW YOUR DRIVERS LICENSE?
The name came during a conversation with my cousin DJ Dak. It was after I
had achieved my spiritual growth. We were debating cool names and I came up
with it and he was daring me on the issue of adopting it - we had been
smoking marijuana. In fact my full name is longer, but my legal name is
Avatar Polymorph - both first names, no surname. My passport is fine but the
bank and some other institutions don't like "no surname" so I don't worry
about correcting them. They don't question the name itself. Most people ask
me its meaning, so I usually say "Vessel of the clan of changeable form" or
if they ask about Avatar mention its original Sanskrit meaning of "He who
walks ahead" or the VR meaning of it. My full name is Avatar Polymorph Star
A Star Alpha Null Radiant Aeon Neon Orthogenesis Axiom Flux, which means -
after AP - every person can be a star, to be first is of no concern, a
bright aeon to come, a glowing new re-ordering of understanding and
changeable and changing laws. So there you are!
