(Casanova)
Total uploading of the mind, and body, will always be science fantasy.
Your wish is not a command. What will be your response if you are wrong?
A biological substrate will always be required for a link-up with a computer.
Again this is not only an assumption but one that bears close scrutiny. Is there a reason biology is required?
Is your concept of spirit biological? Is your god limited to the flesh?
I do not have to believe in your concept of a deity but you need to apply your concepts consistently. Or perhaps you, like Nietzsche assumes that God is dead,
A long time ago I asked everyone to please take a moment to look close at: "what defines life?"
Perhaps it is time to return to that question.
The drippy biobag brain will always be with us.
But, what is wrong with that?
I do not hate organic life, so my response is not in the negative. In the contest of anaerobic and aerobic life for dominance over the light and dark realms of our world is there not a refelcted meaning for the very principle of abiogenesis that could coalesce life itself from the dust of stars? What again defines inanimate matter as distinct from life? Is it a quality of motility, form, and function combined with a self directed will to recreate the molecular state of another similar to the original so as to not be alone?
DNA is just that. a "molecule" of "living crystal" that acquires sentience as it accumulates complexity of form and expression but it is qualitatively so similar for all life that we see that the distinction between archae and eurkaryote is in terms of quantity rather than quality. The basic elements are not different, only how many are present and how they are organized in relation to one another.
The analogy in this case is to see the basic material as clay or concrete and the difference of bacteria and man is like the difference between a primitive mud hut and a city. So you say the molecules of DNA are the only molecules?
What God given premonition determines that to be true? But please respond with facts not mere claims of divine authority, for God can tell me I am heretic himself and none have a right to speak for him. None except those that appear to make such claim by might rather than reason.
Organic molecules are the ones with which we are familiar. Yes, they are the ones adapted to this world of our birth and they are the ones that we can look to for modeling others since they are already proven to work but claiming they are the "only ones possible" is not merely single-minded (saying more of your a priori conclusions); it is an unsupported claim not upheld by the parallel developing area of nanotechnology. It is a conclusion that is seriously premature. Let us please all agree for now that the facts simply aren't all in.
Perhaps however, it is that very search for truth that you object to as implied by claiming we are not yet ready as a species. I would be more sympathetic to your perspective if you were among those helping to make us ready rather than thinking such growth cannot succeed, or should be stopped.
Humans have a ways to go yet socially, I cannot dispute that and my fears of abuse are substantiated not merely by history but an analysis of current events but in this respect I try to go beyond hope, beyond dependency on belief and optimism, for on this I become the calculating pragmatist defining fate as what we make it.
What we should be focusing on here is not unproven assumptions, and materialist hopes that we are nothing but physical patterns, and nothing but atoms. That is opinion, and belief.
What is technically possible without question, are advanced link-ups with the biological neurons, and artificial electronic neurons.
I happen to agree with this in general and suggest to you that it is good advice; as good for the gander as the goose. If "what is technologically possible without question" is validated empirically then it belies the presupposition logically, which you make in the first place.
As a personal adherent and individual desirous of transcendent communication with others of my kind through this new medium of Techlepathy I disagree with your premise that the communicative form is simply between organic and artificial neurons, the currently evolving relationship is more subtle. It is the extrapolation and enhancement of our
social communication traits and it is about enhanced communication between our organic neurons and other organic neurons across even species and interpersonal barriers that is contributing both to the reorganization of the artificial neurons consequentially and their forced evolution qualitatively.
"It," the nascent artificially intelligent Webmind is also being itself transformed as a consequence of a synergistic adaptation to us. We are creating Artificial Life not merely in our own image but in relation to ourselves. It adapts to our demands, our environment, and our behavior. It adapts by both response to us and through determinism because for the time being at least we define the causal states of its evolution till it can decide for itself. Inother words we are its environment of creation and the "designers of its form" in relation to our own needs.
The change is evolving for artificial life out of an interactive, (for now) interdependent relationship it possesses
WITH organic life. But this driving force has been and still is the creation of artificial neurons to enhance the ability for our own organic neurons to maximize our ability to communicate and commune among ourselves.
Speaking of belief; I will place future money on the fact that total uploading is not possible, ever. I will collect that doe in a couple of hundred years.
This last comment intrigues me on many levels for first of all it appears that you have joined our ranks one way or another and now debate as some of us do the more arcane distinction between what Till called "emortality" and the more pedestrain understanding of immortality.
As a fundamental pragmatist I will debate forever and from time to time till achieved... or until I can no longer validate the claim by virtue of my death. I do however leave my arguments behind as a memetic challenge for those still alive to contemplate in the age old first attempt at immortality through authorship. As many of us say: "Ask me again in a thousand years if this has been long enough."
I will ask you to pay up your debts in a "couple of hundred years" if things go as I suspect they will, or I will gladly pay you in turn.
)
Second, I will not debate the inherent tautology of your claims, I prefer to contribute to the process that either proves you correct or false empirically, by the success or failure of the attempt to make your claim false with advanced applied technology.
For what it is worth, claims like yours have been the very dares proven wrong repeatedly throughout history, the very ones that have themselves consisently contributed to our growth as a species along with the very problems you lament. I have found it is vastly more productive to contribute to a better result through engagement of the process rather than a simplistic denial of its validity; for simplistic denial tends to create the worst case scenarios of self fulfilling prophecy.
Lastly (for the moment), understand the driving force of
Techlepathy is as pernicious as a telephone because as a species we want to reach out and do more than touch one another. There are already a great many of us worldwide that are unafraid to share our "selves." What we seek are simply the means and those like-minded individuals with whom such sharing can be done lovingly, sanely, and with honest mutual benefit and commitment.
More importantly, "it is exactly what the doctor ordered" so to speak, for the growing global crisis is in great measure a result of failed specific and general communications combined with an inability to trust one another. There is a prevalent and pernicious inherent suspicion of motive, intention, and presented claims, and with good reason as this mistrust is supported by fact.
So imagine instead diplomats and representatives incapable of lying to one another in their negotiations because they are required to bear their heart and souls, required to negotiate openly and can hide no secrets, perhaps we might overcome the nuances of socio and psychological linguistics that are so confounding to the possibility of building a true and lasting global peace.
Imagine instead politicians who are limited by technology to only being able to speak the truth to their people. I see these as the driving pragmatic force building the web upon which we negotiate the future, communicate our greatest fears and hopes; defining reason for being. This technology is reflecting a memetically driven social evolution that demands on the basis of our collective need as a species; and these needs are those already transcendent of the rules of flesh to sustain our hearts and minds.
I am such a one that would walk upon the wire in my mind, take that trip out of body and seek to learn all I can of organic, material, and incorporeal reality. Why not I ask you? Is this to be only all about life ruled by fear? Your fears at that?
To gaze upon the magnitude of the Universe unfettered by eyes that burn to cinders when gazing into the Sun, flesh which freezing to death in shadows and senses that are not only fooled all too easily but that are limited to spectra and qualities designed for only one single type of world when now the possibility of exploring millions of different types now is imaginable.
I love the body. True of late I have been violating my own rules and focusing upon the mind at the expense of my bag of bones but it is the balance twixt the two that I seek, not escape.
I am not afraid of flesh, or touch; I do not cower at the concept of love. What I do however grasp is the desire to transcend the flesh and cast my being into forms that might penetrate the mists of Jupiter so as to explore the vortex of the Storm, share a moment behind the eye of the cat, and taste the hot brine depths at the crack of birth and doom exposing the very heart of our world by finding form to fit the means capable of doing so, and to share form in a myriad of ways between ourselves as beings too.
Hate organic life?
Far from it my friend, I revel in it. I seek to find form fit as needed and be able to shed it like the skin of a snake or metamorphose like the larval butterfly into a living winged being. Is this only a flight of fancy?
How much are you laying down on this bet?
Edited by Lazarus Long, 07 December 2003 - 06:24 AM.