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Chat for Dec 22


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#1 Bruce Klein

  • Guardian Founder
  • 8,794 posts
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  • Location:United States

Posted 23 December 2002 - 10:39 AM


17:54:37 Nus Was anyone going to copypaste BJKlein's intro speech here? Or should I do it?
17:54:44 Nus In a few minutes, I mean
17:54:49 ChrisRovner Yes, I will
17:54:57 Nus OK
17:59:21 ChrisRovner "BJKlein is away watching 'Lord of the Rings, Two Towers' with Susan/Family, Sorry he could not make the chat. Join us next week as we discuss the Topic: New Year's Resolutions (Sun Dec. 29th)"
17:59:31 ChrisRovner -- Official Chat Begins Now --
17:59:31 ChrisRovner Topic: Average Lifespan & Maximum Lifespan
17:59:39 ChrisRovner "2,000 yrs ago the average human life expectancy was less than 19yrs. Today, if you're lucky enough to live in one of the developed countries, your life expectancy is projected closer to 80."
17:59:46 ChrisRovner "So what's going here? Why is this happening... and, more importantly, will slow or stop?"
17:59:54 ChrisRovner "Personally, I don't see this trend slowing. As a matter of fact, I believe it will continue a upward assent into a more vertical profile, not unlike Moore's law graph."
18:00:00 ChrisRovner "Nevertheless, this is just my personal opinion, and rightfully subject to heated debate. And I'm happy to announce, this topic is being debated heatedly."
18:00:09 ChrisRovner "Pose the question of maximum lifespan to most scientists and you'll likely get the following response, 'There is a limit, yet, we're not quite sure what it is yet.' "
18:00:16 ChrisRovner "Limit? Bahhh"
18:00:20 ChrisRovner "Let's listen to the other side of the debate... To quote a Sept 2002 LEF.org article by William Fallon, 'history has often shown that, before a major breakthrough occurs, experts go out of their way to deny that it will ever happen.' "
18:00:32 ChrisRovner "Fallon backs up this assessment by making the following observation, 'a calculation was made in 1928 indicating that the average human life span could not exceed 64.75 years. At that time, life expectancy in the United States was only 57 years.' However, the scientist failed to recognize that certain populations in New Zealand had already sustained life expectancies of 65.93 years.
18:00:32 ChrisRovner On a similar note, Jim Oeppen, senior research associate at Cambridge, says, 'One of the assumptions is that life expectancy will rise a bit and then reach a ceiling it cannot go through.' Oeppen continues, 'But people have been assuming that since the 1920s and it hasn't proved to be the case.' "
18:00:49 John_Ventureville I see things have started
18:00:50 John_Ventureville good
18:00:54 ChrisRovner "Reference: http://www.imminst.o...t...mp;t=108&s= "



18:01:04 ChrisRovner "Thanks for listening. We're now open for discussion... What will the trend look like? Is there a limit? ect." -- BJK
18:02:07 Kalkor Kalkor (~kalkor@[death to spam].12-231-184-125.client.attbi.com) has joined #immortal

18:02:23 John_Ventureville I wish BJK could schedule his film viewing around these chats....
18:02:24 John_Ventureville lol
18:03:49 John_Ventureville With the coming advances in genetic engineering and nanotech, etc. I don't see any ultimate limit, though scientists generally don't want to go out on a limb and be seen as unrealistic.
18:04:19 Eliezer *cough*protondecay*cough*
18:04:34 Nus proton decay may not happen
18:04:42 John_Ventureville They try to work with the public by speaking of the age limits imposed upon us by nature and how we can maximize them.
18:04:51 ChrisRovner What's that?
18:04:51 Eliezer I know, I was just stating my own opinion indirectly
18:05:06 John_Ventureville Ok... Eliezer....
18:05:35 John_Ventureville I suppose proton decay is the ultimate limit, but a thousand years from now who knows what 31st century scientists and AI will be able to whip up.
18:05:50 John_Ventureville Don't be a shortsighted extropian!
18:05:52 John_Ventureville ; )
18:06:26 Eliezer you've never read any of my stuff, right?
18:06:28 Eliezer thought not
18:06:38 John_Ventureville I've read some of it.
18:06:46 John_Ventureville *certainly not all*
18:07:03 Kalkor immortality is almost certainly low beyond
18:07:17 Eliezer well, I plan on living forever if that's an option, and if not, I'll try to fit as much fun as possible into my meager 1e31 years
18:07:33 John_Ventureville : O
18:07:39 Kalkor heh
18:07:46 Eliezer anything shorter than that gets you laughed out of the crowd, at least where I come from
18:08:21 Eliezer "He told her about the Afterglow: that brief, brilliant period after the Big Bang, when matter gathered briefly in clumps and burned by fusion light."
18:08:21 Eliezer -- Stephen Baxter, "The Gravity Mine"
18:08:58 Nus How probable is it that proton decay prevents the possibility of immortality?
18:09:07 Nus (that's not a rhetorical question, bytheway)
18:09:40 Eliezer not my specialty, don't have the vaguest clue, except that I've been wondering about encoding continuing information-processing into apparently high-entropy systems and I'm not quite sure it's a contradiction in terms
18:09:56 Kalkor as probable as just about anything, relatively

18:10:43 Nus I don't think it is,


18:11:01 Nus IIRC under some scenarios entropy can just rise to infinity as time goes to infinity.
18:11:41 Eliezer um... not sure that makes sense, if you've got a Hamiltonian there's only so much volume for a system state to possibly occupy
18:11:54 Eliezer but then, not my specialty
18:11:58 ChrisRovner Those problems are not ours to solve
18:12:23 ChrisRovner "Our sole responsibility is to build something smarter than ourselves"
18:12:42 Eliezer see, I used to think that, but around three-fourths of my mental toolbox has dependencies on stuff I thought of while I was trying to figure out something impossible
18:13:09 Nus http://www.aeiveos.c...hi-S/EiaEU.html
18:13:41 Nus * Nus quotes:
18:13:42 Nus Thus the model seems to reach the goal of life without end, with the striking feature that life permanently modifies the overall environment to sustain itself, amalgamating black holes and raising the entropy above natural levels by a growing and eventually infinite factor.
18:14:02 HeatDeath HeatDeath (bit@[death to spam].h24-85-16-169.wp.shawcable.net) has joined #immortal

18:14:06 Nus that paper might be out of date, though, I don't know
18:14:14 Nus hi HeatDeath, we were just talking about you
18:14:21 HeatDeath hi nus. really?
18:14:25 HeatDeath good or bad? ;)
18:14:33 Kalkor * Kalkor whistles innocently
18:14:35 Nus About your referent, actually
18:14:40 Nus (?)
18:14:51 Nus Your nick's referent
18:14:52 ChrisRovner Death to heat death!!
18:15:07 ChrisRovner Nothing personal
18:15:39 Nus Isn't heat death an outdated 19th century concept anyway, or?
18:15:51 Nus When they still believed in a nonexpanding Universe?
18:15:58 HeatDeath have they decided whether the universe is open or closed or mu yet?
18:16:04 Nus no
18:17:02 ChrisRovner I didn't say these problems were impossible, I think it's impractical to focus on them (unless it leads to creating seed AI)
18:17:15 HeatDeath well, if it's open, heatdeath is thermoequilibrium. if it's closed, heatdeath is the blasting heat of the big crunch causing death :) [modulo omega point engineering] and if it's mu, then it's still a cool sounding nick :)
18:17:18 ChrisRovner But I guess you can't know in advance
18:17:35 Eliezer despite the bad reputation, entropy is one of the Important Things
18:17:56 Nus increase in entropy?
18:18:10 Eliezer hey, Bayes' Theorem only works in a low-entropy universe


18:18:24 Nus Why?
18:18:40 HeatDeath hmmmm
18:19:08 HeatDeath how do you characterize entropy in terms of probabilistic physics?
18:19:28 HeatDeath ah
18:19:34 Gordon Gordon (~Gordon@[death to spam].cpe-oca-24-136-50-21-cmcpe.ncf.coxexpress.com) has joined #immortal

18:19:41 HeatDeath a high entropy universe has no reliable arrow of time [or worse, several]
18:20:03 Nus Why do you need an arrow of time to apply Bayes' Theorem? :)
18:20:05 Gordon * Gordon looked at the time and realized that I had forgotten; gasp, and it's even on my calendar
18:20:33 Nus Other than because you need an arrow of time to exist?
18:20:51 Gordon Bayes' Theorem does not require time to function
18:21:01 Nus That's what I thought
18:21:03 ChrisRovner I think you're confusing Thermodinamics entropy with Information entropy
18:21:10 HeatDeath A) you don't need an arrow of time to exist. a dense clustering of interactions in an otherwise sparse feynman grap has existence without a fixed arrow of time
18:21:21 HeatDeath Chris: actually, I'm sort of connecting them
18:21:45 ChrisRovner They are similar concepts, but they are not the same thing really
18:21:54 Nus ChrisRovner: why doesn't Bayes' theorem work in a high-information-entropy-Universe?
18:22:16 HeatDeath entropy can be characterized in physics as the tendency of vases to explode when they hit the floor, as opposed to clouds of fragments jumping back up ont pedastels
18:22:27 Nus Doesn't it follow directly from the definition of conditional probabilities?
18:22:39 HeatDeath now, the fragments spontaneously forming a vase is possible, but very improbable
18:22:46 HeatDeath bayes theorem relates to probability
18:22:48 John_Ventureville I feel this discussion was hijacked by the physics crowd. lol I thought we would be discussing life extension developments over the next century or less! But we do need LONG TERM thinkers such as yourselves for the longhaul.
18:23:11 Nus HeatDeath, do you think that if the Universe recollapses, the arrow of time will reverse?
18:23:23 Eliezer mm, problem is, we're all "Must fight proton decay" types, you need another "must fight wrinkles" type to have a dialogue with
18:23:25 ChrisRovner Because it needs regularities. The more regularities in the world, the easier it is to detect them and apply Bayes' Theorem to make predictions or extrapolations
18:23:41 HeatDeath in a low entropy universe, the fragments of vase jumping back onto the pedastel is about as probable, within an order of magnitude, as the vase fallign to the floor
18:23:47 Nus John: it usually goes off topic; this time it was faster than usual, though
18:23:52 John_Ventureville Eli, yes, very true.
18:24:01 Kalkor I see immortality as a side effect of an inevitable process
18:24:10 Nus ChrisRovner: so it's still true, but you can't use it as often?
18:24:14 Kalkor the time scale is fuzzy to me at this point


18:24:15 HeatDeath if physics can and does run reversibly, then there is no reliable arrow of time
18:24:35 ChrisRovner Yes, the more entropy, the harder it gets for intelligence to be successful
18:24:44 Nus That makes sense
18:24:56 Nus HeatDeath: what do you mean by reliable?
18:25:12 Eliezer maxentropy universe == state in one region not correlated with state in any other region == no Bayes' Theorem
18:25:15 HeatDeath Nus: I have no idea. I suspect not, because time's arrow is related to entropy and thermodynamics, while the recollapse is just related to macro movements ina gravitational field
18:25:59 HeatDeath nus: in our universe, the laws of physics never [modulo extreme extreme extreme improbabilities over tiny scales] run backwards
18:26:08 Nus Not yet, anyway
18:26:17 HeatDeath the arrow of time, at our macro scale, is very reliable, it never shifts or falters
18:26:27 Eliezer night all
18:26:31 Eliezer * Eliezer afks
18:26:33 HeatDeath night Eliezer
18:26:34 Kalkor nite Eliezer
18:26:35 Nus night
18:26:52 Gordon ACTION gives Eliezer a stuffed Barney to sleep with
18:26:55 Nus HeatDeath: yes, but maybe that's only because the Universe started in such a low-entropy state
18:27:00 Nus Couldn't it end in one, too?
18:27:21 HeatDeath it could
18:27:44 HeatDeath hmmm
18:27:56 John_Ventureville good night, Eliezer
18:28:21 John_Ventureville stuffed Barney?
18:28:48 Gordon what could be more huggable than a large, purple dinosaur?
18:28:54 ChrisRovner High-entropy joke
18:29:03 John_Ventureville ok.....
18:29:04 Nus Two large, purple dinosaurs
18:31:16 HeatDeath the entropy of the universe does not follow from the macro distribution of matter/energy in it. I think.
18:32:57 HeatDeath hmmmm
18:33:34 Nus Right, so I think it could go both ways.
18:33:49 Nus Depending on where the boundary conditions of Universes come from.
18:34:01 HeatDeath postulate: the laws of thermodymics, as we understand them, are statistical approximatiosn of the bahaviors of large numbers of small quantum system, each of which could, in principle, violate them


18:34:30 HeatDeath yes
18:34:52 HeatDeath large groups of particles are low entropy, for reasons that do not, I think, relate to their interactiosn wth other partles
18:35:49 Nus I'm not sure I see what you mean
18:36:55 HeatDeath imagine a feynman diagram with a few trillion particles in it. that diagram will evolve in a low entropy manner, with a very definite arrow of time
18:37:17 HeatDeath otoh, a feynman diagram system with only a few dozen particles is unliekly to have a fixed arrow of time
18:37:38 Nus I see
18:38:12 HeatDeath hmmm
18:38:20 Nus But I'm not sure whether that's true and why, anymore.
18:38:30 HeatDeath this is starting to smell like an interesting problem of graph theory
18:39:39 HeatDeath what forces must be at work to cause the averaage orintation of vertices in a large graph to tend towards a single [or small integer value of ] major direction[s]
18:39:41 Kalkor Kalkor (~kalkor@[death to spam].12-231-184-125.client.attbi.com) has left #immortal

18:40:01 Nus The force of Coincidence
18:40:10 Nus Suitable initial conditions
18:40:22 HeatDeath there is no coincidence. there is only math :)
18:42:10 Nus If all initial conditions exist, then it's subjective coincidence from not knowing what universe you're in; if not, then I don't see how you can come by the initial conditions mathematically
18:47:44 Utnapishtim Utnapishtim (~jirc@[death to spam].pc-62-30-150-229-hr.blueyonder.co.uk) has joined #immortal

18:47:53 Utnapishtim hey
18:48:00 Utnapishtim how was the chat ?
18:48:12 Utnapishtim oh I guess it hasn't happeend yet!
18:48:14 Nus Short and off-topic.
18:48:19 Utnapishtim lol
18:48:31 Utnapishtim was it about the singularity instead?
18:48:39 Nus Not even
18:48:41 Gordon Gordon (~Gordon@[death to spam].cpe-oca-24-136-50-21-cmcpe.ncf.coxexpress.com) has left #immortal

18:49:18 Utnapishtim I think the maximum lifespan issue is actually an interesting one
18:50:26 Nus Discussion was in a way about maximum lifespan
18:50:31 Nus but on a cosmic timescale
18:51:13 Utnapishtim frankly I am more concerned with more immediate problems
18:51:28 Utnapishtim the death of the universe problem is still sort of long range
18:51:46 Nus True, of course




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