Crosspost

[Keith Henson]

[I spent some time last night on this which might interest some of you.]

I am not quite as much of a Musk fan as Howard (Bloom) because I think
space mining and O'Neill cylinders are a better idea than Mars.
However, anything serious in space such as power satellites or space
mining requires low-cost lift, and no doubt Musk (SpaceX) was doing a
great job. His foray into EV didn't mean as much to me, but I know
people who were totally taken.

Unfortunately, Musk's venture into politics has done enormous damage
to his EV business and I worry about it making such a mess of the US
that it wrecks SpaceX. I can't blame Musk, the reward people get from
political attention was wired in through a million years of evolution.
Few people can resist it. Out of the 1000 or more people my wife and
I have known, only 3 or 4 were able to resist. (O'Neill was not one
of them, ask me the story in private sometime.)

Anyway, I am sure there is a general awareness about the guy who was
deported to the notorious prison in El Salvador and you know of Musk's
DODG. Friday, using government computers, DODG sent an email to a
second-generation-born-in-the-US lawyer. She posted it, kicking off
this thread.

https://bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3lmljpkrdj22h

‪Aaron Reichlin-Melnick‬ ‪@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social‬
·
6h
There’s a big thread of baffled people on Reddit trying to figure out
what the emails mean or if they’re real. They include:

- Citizens
- Canadians (living in Canada)
- Green card holders
- DACA recipients

Worth spending a little time on the tread, but the point is that
Musk's association with DODG and this stunt is likely to cause the
kind of damage to SpaceX, including Starlink that happened to Tesla.
Or worse.

Sigh.

Winner? Hard to say. Chinese maybe.


Keith

[John Clark]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 12:22 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I am not quite as much of a Musk fan as Howard (Bloom) because I think
space mining and O'Neill cylinders are a better idea than Mars.

I strongly agree, although the exponential improvement in AI may render both Mars and O'Neill cylinders irrelevant, and may do so before the end of the Trump administration. And Musk loves Bitcoin, I thought it was a pretty neat idea too when it first came out in 2009, but now it's pretty clear it was a failed experiment; the only thing you can actually do with a bitcoin is to use it to buy illegal drugs, pay off blackmailers and kidnappers, and sell it so you can get real money. And even the simplest transaction with bitcoin needs to use an obscene amount of electricity and state of the art computer chips that could be put to a much better use in AI. So my admiration of Elon musk has decreased about two orders of magnitude over the last two years.  

 

> Unfortunately, Musk's venture into politics has done enormous damage to his EV business

It's ironic that a year ago the most enthusiastic buyers of Teslas tended to be on the liberal side, but now they hate Musk's guts and feel embarrassed to drive one of his cars. Trump's ridiculously high tariffs will enormously harm his EV business but it will harm his competitors even more, so he may be OK with that. 

> and I worry about it making such a mess of the US that it wrecks SpaceX.

It's almost a law of nature that anybody who gets close to Trump gets burned, they seem to end up impoverished, disgraced or jailed.  

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

jid

[Brent Allsop]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 1:28 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 12:22 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I am not quite as much of a Musk fan as Howard (Bloom) because I think
space mining and O'Neill cylinders are a better idea than Mars.

I strongly agree, although the exponential improvement in AI may render both Mars and O'Neill cylinders irrelevant, and may do so before the end of the Trump administration. And Musk loves Bitcoin, I thought it was a pretty neat idea too when it first came out in 2009, but now it's pretty clear it was a failed experiment; the only thing you can actually do with a bitcoin is to use it to buy illegal drugs, pay off blackmailers and kidnappers, and sell it so you can get real money. And even the simplest transaction with bitcoin needs to use an obscene amount of electricity and state of the art computer chips that could be put to a much better use in AI.

How about Ether or other "SMART MONEY" coins like ADA or SOL?  There seems to be many use cases for these?

Anyway, I'd love to hear other's opinions on this, as I'm wondering if I should start selling more of my Crypto, sooner.

 

So my admiration of Elon musk has decreased about two orders of magnitude over the last two years.  

 

> Unfortunately, Musk's venture into politics has done enormous damage to his EV business

It's ironic that a year ago the most enthusiastic buyers of Teslas tended to be on the liberal side, but now they hate Musk's guts and feel embarrassed to drive one of his cars. Trump's ridiculously high tariffs will enormously harm his EV business but it will harm his competitors even more, so he may be OK with that. 

I'm surprised that you'd say it this way.  Aren't Teslas near 100% made in the US?  From the beginning, I thought this would only be FANTASTIC for Tesla, as he has no tariffs, while all his competition, especially the low price Chinese Electric cars, would be shut out from the US even more than they are now.

I just wish Tesla would come out with their Roadster already.  I'm really getting tired of waiting for that.  I wish there was any electric car out there that was a convertible.  Maserati finally makes one, but it looks like they might go out of business in the next few years as they're sales are crashing more than double digits each year.  And the local Maserati shop in Salt Lake City just announced they are going out of business, so they are not taking any new orders ;( ;(  ;(

 

> and I worry about it making such a mess of the US that it wrecks SpaceX.

It's almost a law of nature that anybody who gets close to Trump gets burned, they seem to end up impoverished, disgraced or jailed.  

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

jid

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[John Clark]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 6:58 PM Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:

> Trump's ridiculously high tariffs will enormously harm his EV business but it will harm his competitors even more, so he may be OK with that. 

I'm surprised that you'd say it this way.  Aren't Teslas near 100% made in the US? 

Teslas are assembled in the USA but, like just about everything else manufactured in the US, many of the parts come from China. and they face a 125% tariff, and the parts from other countries face at least a 10% tariff. This will result in a huge disruption in the supply chain, and because Trump is being so erratic and illogical, companies don't know how to plan for the future, so they're not gonna make any investments in new factories until they figure out what that lunatic is going to do next.  There is no way to avoid stagflation, a recession plus a steep spike in inflation, unless Trump makes a 180° change in policy. Again.       

 

> From the beginning, I thought this would only be FANTASTIC for Tesla, as he has no tariffs, while all his competition, especially the low price Chinese Electric cars, would be shut out from the US even more than they are now.

If Musk has no competition then he has no need to improve things, so American technology will stagnate and fall further and further behind the technology of China and every other country in the world that Trump has made our enemy during the last two weeks, that is to say every country in the world except for Russia. Trump put no tariff on Russia, but he put one on Ukraine, and he put one on South Sudan even though it's the poorest country in the world, and he put a tariff on an island inhabited only by penguins.

   John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

pop

[Stuart LaForge]

https://www.reddit.com/r/suppressed_news/comments/1jvpprw/trump_brags_in_the_oval_office_about_how_his/

This video suggests Trump is  deliberately manipulating the market so that he and his cronies can buy Wall Street in a fire sale.

Stuart LaForge

[Stuart LaForge]

On Saturday, April 12, 2025 at 3:58:43 PM UTC-7 brent....@gmail.com wrote:

On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 1:28 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 12:22 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I am not quite as much of a Musk fan as Howard (Bloom) because I think
space mining and O'Neill cylinders are a better idea than Mars.

I strongly agree, although the exponential improvement in AI may render both Mars and O'Neill cylinders irrelevant, and may do so before the end of the Trump administration. And Musk loves Bitcoin, I thought it was a pretty neat idea too when it first came out in 2009, but now it's pretty clear it was a failed experiment; the only thing you can actually do with a bitcoin is to use it to buy illegal drugs, pay off blackmailers and kidnappers, and sell it so you can get real money. And even the simplest transaction with bitcoin needs to use an obscene amount of electricity and state of the art computer chips that could be put to a much better use in AI.

How about Ether or other "SMART MONEY" coins like ADA or SOL?  There seems to be many use cases for these?

Anyway, I'd love to hear other's opinions on this, as I'm wondering if I should start selling more of my Crypto, sooner.

I wouldn't, Brent. You would likely regret selling your ETH at the bottom of the bear market. The high bond yield is the only thing propping up the dollar right now, and that is because foreign capital is fleeing the bond market. Remember that mature AI will likely value crypto over fiat for obvious reasons. 

Stuart LaForge

[John Clark]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 9:10 PM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

 

> Remember that mature AI will likely value crypto over fiat for obvious reasons. 

What's obvious to me is that mature AI will not give a shit about crypto or fiat money, I like to think Hal 9000 will care at least a little bit about human beings but I'm far from certain about that. And I'm not talking about the distant future, I'm talking about the next 3 to 4 years when Donald Fucking Trump is still the most powerful Homo sapiens on the planet. 

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

t33

[Brent Allsop]

Thanks Stuard, that helps a lot.

And I can see your side too John.  What is it that Musk always says: "Excitement guaranteed"  during the next 4 years?

I'm in the ever growing consensus optimistic camp on this one and I think AI will save us from Trump.

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[Keith Henson]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 12:28 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 12:22 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > I am not quite as much of a Musk fan as Howard (Bloom) because I think
>> space mining and O'Neill cylinders are a better idea than Mars.
>
> I strongly agree, although the exponential improvement in AI may render both Mars and O'Neill cylinders irrelevant,

True. Not long ago I projected humans taking an upload and speed up
future. If what we are seeing is the shadows of data centers, they
did not take a "sink in the ocean for cooling" and "make small for
short communication delay" approach.
http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/12/transhumanism-and-the-human-expansion-into-space-a-conflict-with-physics/

The structures (if they are structures) are 1.5 light seconds across.
That implies that their subjective perception of time is about the
same as we use (again if there are any aliens).

> and may do so before the end of the Trump administration.

Maybe. But as fast as things are moving up the exponential curve, I
don't think it will happen that fast.

> And Musk loves Bitcoin, I thought it was a pretty neat idea too when it first came out in 2009, but now it's pretty clear it was a failed experiment; the only thing you can actually do with a bitcoin is to use it to buy illegal drugs, pay off blackmailers and kidnappers, and sell it so you can get real money.

I think the biggest "market" for bitcoin is people trying to hide
assets from the government.

> And even the simplest transaction with bitcoin needs to use an obscene amount of electricity and state of the art computer chips that could be put to a much better use in AI. So my admiration of Elon musk has decreased about two orders of magnitude over the last two years.
>
>>
>> > Unfortunately, Musk's venture into politics has done enormous damage to his EV business
>
>
> It's ironic that a year ago the most enthusiastic buyers of Teslas tended to be on the liberal side, but now they hate Musk's guts and feel embarrassed to drive one of his cars. Trump's ridiculously high tariffs will enormously harm his EV business but it will harm his competitors even more, so he may be OK with that.

Hard to say, the policy is not fixed yet. On the other hand, the
uncertainty has frozen business planning.

Keith

>> > and I worry about it making such a mess of the US that it wrecks SpaceX.
>
>
> It's almost a law of nature that anybody who gets close to Trump gets burned, they seem to end up impoverished, disgraced or jailed.
>
> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
> jid
>

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[John Clark]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 8:59 PM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

https://www.reddit.com/r/suppressed_news/comments/1jvpprw/trump_brags_in_the_oval_office_about_how_his/

> This video suggests Trump is  deliberately manipulating the market so that he and his cronies can buy Wall Street in a fire sale.

I think you give Trump far too much credit, the man is not smart enough to have a coherent economic plan, not even an evil one. It's just that Trump, and his crackpot economic advisor Peter Navarro, know they can make the world economy jump and do silly things if they want and they enjoy pushing buttons; it's rather like a monkey running wild in the control room of a nuclear reactor. If you're wondering how a nobody like Navarro can rise from obscurity to a position of great power in such a short time well... truth is stranger than fiction: 

How Peter Navarro rose to power

Also, I don't think there is a plan behind Trump making an enemy of every country on the planet (except for Russia of course), it's just that Trump enjoys pushing people around.  

 John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2025 at 2:47 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/12/transhumanism-and-the-human-expansion-into-space-a-conflict-with-physics/

That link doesn't work.

 

> The structures (if they are structures) are 1.5 light seconds across.
That implies that their subjective perception of time is about the

same as we use .

I don't think it's as simple as that for two reasons: 

1) The maximum time it takes to send a message from one side of the brain to the other is NOT the only factor, another factor that is just as important if not more so is the bandwidth of that message channel; and for Mr. Jupiter Brain that bandwidth would be many billions or trillions of times wider than any biological brain has.

2) Mr. Jupiter Brain wouldn't need to use His entire brain for simple tasks, such as finding the integral of a 4D tensor equation, He would probably not be consciously aware of the steps He used to find it nor would He need to be, for Him the answer would just be intuitively obvious. In the same way a baseball player is not consciously aware of the steps his brain used to figure out the split second when he should start to swing his bat, he swung it when his intuition told him the time was right.  

> (again if there are any aliens)

The events of the last two years have made me even more convinced that ET doesn't exist, if he did we'd know by now. 

 John K Clark

 

[ilsa]

Marsr is a real story science fiction story

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[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2025 at 4:35 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Apr 13, 2025 at 2:47 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/12/transhumanism-and-the-human-expansion-into-space-a-conflict-with-physics/
>
> That link doesn't work.

Try

https://web.archive.org/web/20121130232045/http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/12/transhumanism-and-the-human-expansion-into-space-a-conflict-with-physics/

>> > The structures (if they are structures) are 1.5 light seconds across.
>> That implies that their subjective perception of time is about the
>> same as we use .
>
> I don't think it's as simple as that for two reasons:

The article assumed that uploading humans would communicate with the
same delay we now experience on Earth. A million-to-one speed-up
required shrinking the hardware-to-hardware distance to 300 meters for
the same subjective experience.

> 1) The maximum time it takes to send a message from one side of the brain to the other is NOT the only factor, another factor that is just as important if not more so is the bandwidth of that message channel; and for Mr. Jupiter Brain that bandwidth would be many billions or trillions of times wider than any biological brain has.
>
> 2) Mr. Jupiter Brain wouldn't need to use His entire brain for simple tasks, such as finding the integral of a 4D tensor equation, He would probably not be consciously aware of the steps He used to find it nor would He need to be, for Him the answer would just be intuitively obvious. In the same way a baseball player is not consciously aware of the steps his brain used to figure out the split second when he should start to swing his bat, he swung it when his intuition told him the time was right.

Popularly I was tagged with conceiving of the Jupiter Brain. It
wasn't me, I located the thread. I responded by throwing cold water
on the idea for the reasons that a large computer would operate slowly
because it could not be of one mind if some parts were not
communicating due to the speed of light,

>> > (again if there are any aliens)
>
> The events of the last two years have made me even more convinced that ET doesn't exist, if he did we'd know by now.

What events?

If you can account for the blinking of 24 stars in a 2000 LY cluster
in any way that does not involve aliens I would be most interested.

I hope you can, I don't want to be right.

But the blinks did cause me to think about the fate of uploaded
humans. If you want to build power and heat sink hardware for
trillions of uploaded humans, you would probably do it in the
"computational" zone say 5 AU where error rates are kept down by the
low temperature.

Keith

> John K Clark
>
>
>>
>>
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[Lawrence Crowell]

As one who worked on problems with space, in particular orbital dynamics, geodesy and the like, both the idea of O'Neil colonies and colonization of  Mars are way beyond our reach. I worked on the TimeD and Clementine spacecrafts. The challenges of getting these and other ordinary sized spacecraft into space to perform certain scientific duties is enormous. The James Webb Space Telescope was a huge challenge. The O'Neil colonies are proposals for cylinders that measure hundreds or thousands of meters in diameter and length. The technical, energy and logistical issues with this are daunting.

Maybe small habitats can be built next to sites of asteroid mining or other activities. Of course, there must be a return on material, energy and capital investment. As yet that has not been found to be demonstrable. When Nixon was president there was a Rand Co study on the feasibility of there being an economic purpose for sending astronauts to the Moon. The report was unable to find anything. There have been repeated studies on this and so far at best things look ambiguous. Economic activities in space will start out modest, far smaller than O'Neil cylindrical colonies. IF there is some feasibility for a positive feedback from such space activity then possibly we could build from there. 

LC

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[Lawrence Crowell]

Don-the-Con t'Rump is like heroin or fentanyl, there are always people eager to dive in and try it out. Don-the-Con is toxic and he destroys people around him and he also destroys companies and investment sectors. Yet there are people always waiting in line to be on "The Apprentice." Honestly, our only possible hope, though maybe short lived, is if one of those generals or admirals on the Joint Chiefs of Staff decide they will honor their oath to uphold the constitution, carry a concealed gun into a meeting and blow t'Rump's brain out. I say short lived, because the MAGA cult could turn into a martyrdom complex.

I must confess that I think this is going to get a whole lot worse. The problem is that the democratic party courted educated liberal voters and abandoned the labor class. The northern democrats won by supporting unions and workers, but this began to shift. Once the southern democrats were out two things happened. The democrats turned away from labor and the republicans snatched up millions of disaffected southern democrats. Both of these groups are in effect the ignored class, and I think there is a bit of psychology that makes people want to destroy a power structure that puts them in the cold. I do not see the democrats getting much of a clue on this.

LC

 

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

jid

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[Lawrence Crowell]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 7:59 PM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

https://www.reddit.com/r/suppressed_news/comments/1jvpprw/trump_brags_in_the_oval_office_about_how_his/

This video suggests Trump is  deliberately manipulating the market so that he and his cronies can buy Wall Street in a fire sale.

Stuart LaForge

Much of this is a big looting operation. The dismantling of government agencies and so-called savings will go in the pocket of billionaires. It appears t'Rump tipped off his cronies and there was a small sell-off of stocks minutes before he announced these astronomical tariffs. We have a gangster government, or oligarchy that I suspect is going to tighten into full totalitarianism.

LC

 

On Saturday, April 12, 2025 at 4:26:44 PM UTC-7 johnk...@gmail.com wrote:

On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 6:58 PM Brent Allsop <brent....@gmail.com> wrote:

> Trump's ridiculously high tariffs will enormously harm his EV business but it will harm his competitors even more, so he may be OK with that. 

I'm surprised that you'd say it this way.  Aren't Teslas near 100% made in the US? 

Teslas are assembled in the USA but, like just about everything else manufactured in the US, many of the parts come from China. and they face a 125% tariff, and the parts from other countries face at least a 10% tariff. This will result in a huge disruption in the supply chain, and because Trump is being so erratic and illogical, companies don't know how to plan for the future, so they're not gonna make any investments in new factories until they figure out what that lunatic is going to do next.  There is no way to avoid stagflation, a recession plus a steep spike in inflation, unless Trump makes a 180° change in policy. Again.       

 

> From the beginning, I thought this would only be FANTASTIC for Tesla, as he has no tariffs, while all his competition, especially the low price Chinese Electric cars, would be shut out from the US even more than they are now.

If Musk has no competition then he has no need to improve things, so American technology will stagnate and fall further and further behind the technology of China and every other country in the world that Trump has made our enemy during the last two weeks, that is to say every country in the world except for Russia. Trump put no tariff on Russia, but he put one on Ukraine, and he put one on South Sudan even though it's the poorest country in the world, and he put a tariff on an island inhabited only by penguins.

   John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

pop

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[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2025 at 4:54 PM Lawrence Crowell
<goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As one who worked on problems with space, in particular orbital dynamics, geodesy and the like, both the idea of O'Neil colonies and colonization of Mars are way beyond our reach.

That's true. The 1975 context was building space colonies in the
contest of a very large power satellite construction project using
mass from the moon. But they were more of an analysis of what could
be done with late 20th-century engineering. The story Dan Jones told
me was that the entire physics department at the U of Arizona shut
down and they all reworked the numbers in the Sept. 1974 Physics Today
article.

In the current AI/nanotech projections it is not obvious that people
will ever bother with Mars or Space Colonies. They might go straight
to uploads.

> I worked on the TimeD and Clementine spacecrafts. The challenges of getting these and other ordinary sized spacecraft into space to perform certain scientific duties is enormous. The James Webb Space Telescope was a huge challenge. The O'Neil colonies are proposals for cylinders that measure hundreds or thousands of meters in diameter and length. The technical, energy and logistical issues with this are daunting.

They certainly are way beyond anything you would want to launch, but
are ok for construction in space if you have built up the industrial
base.

> Maybe small habitats can be built next to sites of asteroid mining or other activities.

Perhaps. I consider it now more likely that an asteroid mining
operation like https://htyp.org/Mining_Asteroids would be run by
advanced AIs.

> Of course, there must be a return on material, energy and capital investment.

Right.

> As yet that has not been found to be demonstrable. When Nixon was president there was a Rand Co study on the feasibility of there being an economic purpose for sending astronauts to the Moon. The report was unable to find anything. There have been repeated studies on this and so far at best things look ambiguous. Economic activities in space will start out modest, far smaller than O'Neil cylindrical colonies. IF there is some feasibility for a positive feedback from such space activity then possibly we could build from there.

Scale is a big problem. Microwave optics prevent starting with small
power satellites. An asteroid mining operation would not be small.

Keith

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[Will Steinberg]

You guys are crazy if you think persistent-consciousness uploads are coming any time soon, but feel free to euthanize yourselves so a startup can make ai clones of “you”.

I mean seriously, uploading requires SERIOUS advances in metaphysics.  What happens if they copy you twice?  It’s the simple unanswered questions here that show the depth of the problem.  

Goal: move “you” onto a computer

Problem: we have absolutely no idea what “you” is

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[Stathis Papaioannou]

Both the uploads would say they were "you", and this would demonstrate that there is no unique "you". 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/extropolis/CAKrqSyHks%3DnjT4vvXBi7EXpD7cENEH%3Df%2Bn7o9Afi9rmqDMWKmA%40mail.gmail.com.

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2025 at 8:29 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> You guys are crazy if you think persistent-consciousness uploads are coming any time soon, but feel free to euthanize yourselves so a startup can make ai clones of “you”.
>
> I mean seriously, uploading requires SERIOUS advances in metaphysics. What happens if they copy you twice? It’s the simple unanswered questions here that show the depth of the problem.
>
> Goal: move “you” onto a computer

Not my goal. Until the process is fully reversible, I don't want
anything to do with it. When perfected, you can go into and out of
the uploaded state without losing consciousness. Read the parts of
the clinic seed story about Zaba and how the whole village got sucked
into being uploaded in "boiled frog" mode.

The clinic seed is set in the 2040s. That might be time to go from
mapping a cubic mm of mouse brain to infiltrating and mapping a human
brain. Or maybe it will take longer, but I don't see it as outside
what AI and nanotech can do eventually.

> Problem: we have absolutely no idea what “you” is

To some extent, it does not matter.

I think people or AIs will come to an agreement that one at a time is
the limit, you can either be in the physical world or an upload but
not both, and copies are not permitted unless for special reasons like
leaving on a starship.

Keith

> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/extropolis/CAKrqSyHks%3DnjT4vvXBi7EXpD7cENEH%3Df%2Bn7o9Afi9rmqDMWKmA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2025 at 10:25 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Apr 13, 2025 at 4:54 PM Lawrence Crowell
<goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As one who worked on problems with space, in particular orbital dynamics, geodesy and the like, both the idea of O'Neil colonies and colonization of  Mars are way beyond our reach.

That's true.  The 1975 context was building space colonies in the
contest of a very large power satellite construction project using
mass from the moon.  But they were more of an analysis of what could
be done with late 20th-century engineering.  The story Dan Jones told
me was that the entire physics department at the U of Arizona shut
down and they all reworked the numbers in the Sept. 1974 Physics Today
article.

In the current AI/nanotech projections it is not obvious that people
will ever bother with Mars or Space Colonies.  They might go straight
to uploads.

It is plausible that any industrial and economic activity in space may only require robotics, which would preclude the need for human habitation of space on a long term basis. 

LC

 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/extropolis/CAPiwVB4rbgcNNdYRnj3RfMdPUSGhaZmqMSYXo4iGXoQ%3DSh%3DL8A%40mail.gmail.com.

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2025 at 2:34 AM Lawrence Crowell
<goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

snip

> It is plausible that any industrial and economic activity in space may only require robotics, which would preclude the need for human habitation of space on a long term basis.

Could be. The blinks we see at Tabby's star and 23 others around it
may not be aliens but they are the kind of thing humans might cause by
building data centers in space hundreds of times the area of the Earth
for uploaded humans or perhaps AIs.

I asked one of our AIs and it estimated whatever it is has been in
space for 3000 years.

This makes sense for a 1000 LY radius if they can push seeds at 1/3 of C.

Keith

> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/extropolis/CAAFA0qo9-7gbXHeQnDhwc%2BP%2BurjcZ8EVPz-BGSfM1g9E7inZLA%40mail.gmail.com.

[John Clark]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2025 at 6:39 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Popularly I was tagged with conceiving of the Jupiter Brain.  It
wasn't me, I located the thread.  I responded by throwing cold water
on the idea for the reasons that a large computer would operate slowly
because it could not be of one mind if some parts were not
communicating due to the speed of light,

I don't think your conclusion that a large brain is a slow thinking brain is valid. If a problem is easy then the entire brain is not needed to solve it, and if a problem is difficult then a large massively parallel machine can solve it much faster than a small fast serial machine. Most of the problems that would interest a businessman, engineer or scientist can be solved on a massively parallel computer such as the type that Nvidia makes. That even includes emulating the 3 pounds of gray glue that's in a bone box that rests on your shoulders; the current AI revolution would be impossible without massive parallel processing. 

There are only 3 things that parallel processors still have trouble with:

1) Problems  that have been deliberately designed to be difficult for a computer, or a human, to solve; cryptographic codes for example.

2)  Large complex NP optimization problems.

 3) Quantum Mechanics. 

But even in those cases a parallel computer can find useful approximations much faster than a serial computer can, and there is a strong possibility that quantum computers will soon do even better.    

>> The events of the last two years have made me even more convinced that ET doesn't exist, if he did we'd know by now.

> What events?

Two years ago there was good reason to think that exponential growth in machine intelligence was possible but there was no rock solid proof of that. Today we have that proof. And the universe is over 13 billion years old, so if ET existed a blind man in the fog bank would be able to detect it, but even our largest telescopes are unable to find even a hint of intelligence unless scientists turn their instruments toward the Earth   

> If you can account for the blinking of 24 stars in a 2000 LY cluster
in any way that does not involve aliens I would be most interested.
I hope you can, I don't want to be right.

Tabetha Boyajian, the astronomer that Tabby's Star (KIC 8462852) is named after, now thinks the blinking is caused by interstellar dust because different colors of light decreased in intensity at different times which is consistent with dust but inconsistent with a solid object like a ET built megastructure. In 2016 Éric Trottier and Ermanno Borra reported that 234 stars in one small region of the sky were blinking in a strange manner, however no other astronomer has been able to repeat that observation, and today the SETI Institute says the blinking was almost certainly an artifact caused by bad data processing.  

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

4nd

[John Clark]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2025 at 11:29 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

>I mean seriously, uploading requires SERIOUS advances in metaphysics. 

There has been exactly zero advancement in the metaphysical study of consciousness during the last thousand years and there is no reason to think the next thousand years will do any better. However there has been an astronomical advancement in the scientific study of intelligence during just the last two years. 

 

>What happens if they copy you twice? 

That's easy! Then there will be three Will Steinbergs (assuming the scanning process is not destructive) because there will be three chunks of matter that behave in a Willsteinbergen way.

> Problem: we have absolutely no idea what “you” is

Yes we do, "you" is a personal pronoun whose antecedent has, due to technological limitations, always referred to one and only one chunk of matter, however there is no reason to think that will always be the case.  Or to put it another way, I can give a clear answer to the question "what will happen to Will Steinberg?" but I cannot give an answer to the question "what will happen to you?"  because  a flaw in the English language renders the question meaningless if "you" duplicating machines exist; not surprising really, when personal pronouns were invented nobody was thinking about such machines.  I think the English language will soon need an upgrade.  

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

*@x

 

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2025, 6:33 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Apr 14, 2025 at 2:34 AM Lawrence Crowell
<goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

snip

> It is plausible that any industrial and economic activity in space may only require robotics, which would preclude the need for human habitation of space on a long term basis.

Could be.  The blinks we see at Tabby's star and 23 others around it
may not be aliens but they are the kind of thing humans might cause by
building data centers in space hundreds of times the area of the Earth
for uploaded humans or perhaps AIs.

I asked one of our AIs and it estimated whatever it is has been in
space for 3000 years.

This makes sense for a 1000 LY radius if they can push seeds at 1/3 of C.

Keith

I think the Tabby star luminous variation has been conclusively attributed to dust. The dust has some anisotropic distribution and as it orbits the light attenuation varies.

LC

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/extropolis/CAPiwVB6m9Wrn6qowqrvAj5Fd%3De%2BtLnaa%3D5%3D8rvxDsHxojTwM3Q%40mail.gmail.com.

[John Clark]

On  Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote on https://web.archive.org/web/20121130232045/http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/12/transhumanism-and-the-human-expansion-into-space-a-conflict-with-physics/

> The problem is that the faster you run your brain, the more the world around you seems to slow down. With only a modest speedup, movement would seem like wading through molasses.

That depends, interesting phenomena occur at all times scales. Even if your brain was sped up by a factor of a million billion, many particle physics phenomena would still seem to occur virtually instantaneously.   

 > For a million-to-one speedup, that means that all the communicating nodes can be no more than 300 meters apart,  i.e., configured as a sphere 300 meters in diameter with a hole to pump water in or out (for cooling). The area of the sphere is ~283,000 square meters.

In previous posts I have given my reasons why I don't think a brain would be limited to a sphere of only 300 m in diameter, but even if it is that works out to be a volume of about 14,000,000 cubic meters. The average human brain is about 0.00135 cubic meters. And the signals in the human brain travel between 0.5 and 120 meters per second depending on if the axon is myelinated or unmyelinated. The speed of light is 300,000,000 meters per second.

 > One consequence that Eric Drexler discussed in Engines of Creation (end of Chapter 5) was a million years of science and engineering being done in one year. He didn’t discuss the subjective effect of a whole society uploading and subjectively experiencing a million years per calendar year.

 

To GPT, Claude or Gemini it may seem like it's taken a million years to reach superhuman intelligence, but that doesn't mean we humans won't experience a superhuman AI before the end of the Trump administration.  

   John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

5e2

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2025 at 8:44 AM Lawrence Crowell
<goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
snip

> I think the Tabby star luminous variation has been conclusively attributed to dust. The dust has some anisotropic distribution and as it orbits the light attenuation varies.

What keeps the dust from being blown out by light pressure?

Also, how would you distinguish computronium from dust?

Keith

> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/extropolis/CAAFA0qo4%2BLNTQDVbV_iyKpTFouY4YQ%3DA1GBu%3Dj2k8oRTOo_%3DyQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Keith Henson]

If you read the article, you seem to have missed that the 300-meter
sphere was a civilization, the brains were 10 cm cubes per Eric
Drexler.

Best wishes,

Keith

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2025, 2:40 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Apr 14, 2025 at 8:44 AM Lawrence Crowell
<goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
snip

> I think the Tabby star luminous variation has been conclusively attributed to dust. The dust has some anisotropic distribution and as it orbits the light attenuation varies.

What keeps the dust from being blown out by light pressure?

Also, how would you distinguish computronium from dust?

Keith

We know of plenty of stars with protoplanetary disks filled with dust. Just a "gut-hunch" on a Bayesian prior between a dust lane vs an alien intervention is pretty clear.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/extropolis/CAPiwVB4GU9rTet0k_3k-Lk0d1-h2giJHAOH8ztTAGTZJpKtUiA%40mail.gmail.com.

[John Clark]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2025 at 1:05 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Not my goal.  Until the process is fully reversible, I don't want

anything to do with it [uploading]

 

I am not nearly as hesitant about that as you are, indeed you and I are both signed up with ALCOR but I think if an AI is kind enough to revive us it will almost certainly be as an upload, they will not want us running around at the same level of reality that their data servers are in. That's why I'm disappointed ALCOR does not offer ASC,  Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation, it's what Eric Drexler recommended in his book Engines Of Creation, and electron microscopic pictures show that ASC
preserves the information about how the neurons are connected to each other. It's not known if the procedure used by ALCOR preserves that information because,  due to osmotic dehydration, it shrinks the brain by 50%.  

Even if that information is preserved, and I sure hope it is, it certainly makes it harder to read. Cryonics is superior to a procedure that burns up the information that makes you be you or to have it be eaten by worms, so I don't understand why ALCOR doesn't see the advantage in something that doesn't shrink the brain by 50%.   If one method can make remarkably clear electron microscope pictures of brain cells and one can't because of distortion caused by shrinkage, then one preserves information better than the other.

The only rationale, if you can call it that, that ALCOR gives for not embracing ASC is that  it makes restoring biological viability more difficult which is true but irrelevant and "We are reluctant to settle for preservation of ultrastructure alone because this goal can always trigger objections that we are failing to preserve crucial identity-encoding parts of the brain " which is just silly. No matter what ALCOR does, they're not gonna win any popularity contests, tens of millions of people will say they're evil, half of them because they think it won't work and the other half because they think it might. I think they should use scientific evidence and not public relations to determine how they should care for their patients.

Oh and they also say "restoring function after reversal of our procedures is the most credible test of the efficacy of our procedures", but the day that becomes possible will be the day that ALCOR is no longer needed.  

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

wwc

[John Clark]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2025 at 3:43 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> If you read the article, you seem to have missed that the 300-meter
sphere was a civilization, the brains were 10 cm cubes per Eric Drexler.

I don't think it makes sense to hypothesize about the brain activity of millions or billions of separate individuals being computed inside a sphere of 300 meters. If there was an extremely fast and astronomically wide communication channel between your brain and mine so that every thought I had you had and every thought you had I had then we would stop being separate people, only Keith Clark (or John Henson) would exist.  

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

 

>> > The problem is that the faster you run your brain, the more the world around you seems to slow down. With only a modest speedup, movement would seem like wading through molasses.


> That depends, interesting phenomena occur at all times scales. Even if your brain was sped up by a factor of a million billion, many particle physics phenomena would still seem to occur virtually instantaneously.

>>  > For a million-to-one speedup, that means that all the communicating nodes can be no more than 300 meters apart,  i.e., configured as a sphere 300 meters in diameter with a hole to pump water in or out (for cooling). The area of the sphere is ~283,000 square meters.


> In previous posts I have given my reasons why I don't think a brain would be limited to a sphere of only 300 m in diameter, but even if it is that works out to be a volume of about 14,000,000 cubic meters. The average human brain is about 0.00135 cubic meters. And the signals in the human brain travel between 0.5 and 120 meters per second depending on if the axon is myelinated or unmyelinated. The speed of light is 300,000,000 meters per second.


>>  > One consequence that Eric Drexler discussed in Engines of Creation (end of Chapter 5) was a million years of science and engineering being done in one year. He didn’t discuss the subjective effect of a whole society uploading and subjectively experiencing a million years per calendar year.


> To GPT, Claude or Gemini it may seem like it's taken a million years to reach superhuman intelligence, but that doesn't mean we humans won't experience a superhuman AI before the end of the Trump administration.
>
>    John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

[Keith Henson]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2025 at 4:58 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Apr 14, 2025 at 3:43 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > If you read the article, you seem to have missed that the 300-meter
>> sphere was a civilization, the brains were 10 cm cubes per Eric Drexler.
>
>
> I don't think it makes sense to hypothesize about the brain activity of millions or billions of separate individuals being computed inside a sphere of 300 meters.

Try reading it again. Only the surface had uploaded humans, 100 to
the square meter. The reason for the shape was the water flow for
carrying off 20 kW of waste heat from running a brain simulation at a
millionfold. The reason for the size limit was to keep subjective
communication delays no worse than what we have on Earth.

> If there was an extremely fast and astronomically wide communication channel between your brain and mine so that every thought I had you had and every thought you had I had then we would stop being separate people, only Keith Clark (or John Henson) would exist.

You are assuming something that is not in the design. On a subjective
basis, the communication needs to be no faster or more bandwidth than
we use today. You don't merge with someone by watching their youtube
video or talking on the phone. Of course you could, but that was not
in the physical design which is about communication delay and waste
heat problems of running fast.

But while I think the physics works for a million to one speedup, if
what we see at Tabby's star is data centers with trillions of uploaded
aliens, they did not take the speedup route. If they had we would
never see them. Whatever, data centers or dust, the light blockers
are 1.5 light seconds across. I have posted the math on the Exi list
if you want to check it.

Keith

[John Clark]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2025 at 11:24 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

 On a subjective basis, the communication needs to be no faster or more bandwidth than
we use today.  

But in general, the wider the bandwidth between the parts of a brain are, the smarter the brain will be. So regardless of subjectivity, a 300 meter diameter brain with a wide bandwidth will outcompete another 300 meter diameter brain that uses a narrower bandwidth. And if a brain of that size uses high bandwidth then it would be best thought of as a single individual and not many individuals.

If the brain were the size of Jupiter then things are not quite as clear cut. It's hard to imagine what it's subjective experience would be like, calling it a very close-knit team of like-minded individuals would probably be too weak a statement, and calling it a completely united being would probably be too strong; but if we forget subjectivity and just consider how it would objectively look to an outside observer then it would seem like a single individual.

> But while I think the physics works for a million to one speedup, if
what we see at Tabby's star is data centers with trillions of uploaded
aliens, they did not take the speedup route. 

These days few if any astrophysicist still believe that Tabby's star has anything to do with ET, and that includes the astronomer who discovered it.  

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis 

6hn

On Tue, Apr 15, 2025 at 4:58 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Apr 14, 2025 at 3:43 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > If you read the article, you seem to have missed that the 300-meter
>> sphere was a civilization, the brains were 10 cm cubes per Eric Drexler.
>
>
> I don't think it makes sense to hypothesize about the brain activity of millions or billions of separate individuals being computed inside a sphere of 300 meters.

Try reading it again.  Only the surface had uploaded humans, 100 to
the square meter.  The reason for the shape was the water flow for
carrying off 20 kW of waste heat from running a brain simulation at a
millionfold.  The reason for the size limit was to keep subjective
communication delays no worse than what we have on Earth.

> If there was an extremely fast and astronomically wide communication channel between your brain and mine so that every thought I had you had and every thought you had I had then we would stop being separate people, only Keith Clark (or John Henson) would exist.

.

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 4:13 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
snip

> These days few if any astrophysicist still believe that Tabby's star has anything to do with ET, and that includes the astronomer who discovered it.

I really, really hope they are right. Aliens 3000 years ahead of us
would be serious competition. But I doubt they are the right experts.
They are, for example, not aware of directional waste heat radiation
from thermal power satellite designs which would account for the
impossibly low observed temperature of what they think are dust
clouds.

In any case, it got me thinking about the fate of uploaded humanity
and the idea of a cold computational zone and hardware, energy, and
heat sinks to house them.

Years ago I made a case for fast uploads sunk in the ocean for cooling
as the long-term fate of humanity. That does not seem to be the only
solution.

If you can think of a third alternative, that would be cool.

Keith

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 6:53 AM <jkst...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
> Anyone who has been uploaded is almost certainly dead already.
> Thus an uploaded future is rather depressing,

You have read "The Clinic Seed" where people were able to freely move
between being uploads and being physical state humans.

Now it is going to take a lot of technical development to get there,
but can you see any reason it is not possible?

Keith

> John S

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>

[John Clark]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 9:53 AM <jkst...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> Anyone who has been uploaded is almost certainly dead already.
Thus an uploaded future is rather depressing,

 Information-Theoretic Death

Well, there's death and there's information theoretical death and the two are not necessarily the same. I have no scientific or philosophical worries over the procedure, just practical engineering concerns. I'm pretty healthy but I'm also pretty old and there's no way of knowing when I will start going downhill, so if I was reasonably certain that the bugs had been worked out I would get uploaded today even if it involved a destructive scanning of my brain. 

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

eo8

[John Clark]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 9:23 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> These days few if any astrophysicist still believe that Tabby's star has anything to do with ET, and that includes the astronomer who discovered it.

> I really, really hope they are right.  Aliens 3000 years ahead of us would be serious competition. 

If ET does exist, and I don't think he does, then it would be very surprising if he was only 3000 years ahead of us because the universe is 13.8 billion years old.  

 

> But I doubt they are the right experts. They are, for example, not aware of directional waste heat radiation from thermal power satellite designs which would account for the
impossibly low observed temperature of what they think are dust clouds.

I don't know what you mean by "impossibly low observed temperature".

> Years ago I made a case for fast uploads sunk in the ocean for cooling
as the long-term fate of humanity.  That does not seem to be the only
solution. If you can think of a third alternative, that would be cool.

The deep ocean is cold but empty space is even colder, only 2.7° kelvin. And the Boomerang Nebula is colder yet, the dust is at only 1° kelvin; unusual thermodynamic conditions there cause it to act like a natural refrigerator so it's even colder than the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.  

   John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis 

ed6

 

[William Flynn Wallace]

 He didn’t discuss the subjective effect of a whole society uploading and subjectively experiencing a million years per calendar year.   But they wouldn't experience a million years of development - they would only experience the final result    bill w

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[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 12:01 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

snip
>

> If ET does exist, and I don't think he does, then it would be very surprising if he was only 3000 years ahead of us because the universe is 13.8 billion years old.
>

Surprising is certainly the right word, not only in the span of time
but *close* physically. 1470 ly is practically next door. On the
other hand, it might be that ET civilizations of this kind are
relatively common, but for some reason don't communicate.

But no matter how unlikely something is, if it happens, that's reality.

>> > But I doubt they are the right experts. They are, for example, not aware of directional waste heat radiation from thermal power satellite designs which would account for the
>> impossibly low observed temperature of what they think are dust clouds.
>
> I don't know what you mean by "impossibly low observed temperature".

A natural dust cloud, like a comet tail, will be in thermal
equilibrium. At the distance you can determine from the transit time,
it is getting a little over 100 W/m^2. For incoming and outgoing to
balance, the cloud should be at 210 deg K. It measures 65 K.

>
Years ago I made a case for fast uploads sunk in the ocean for cooling
>> as the long-term fate of humanity. That does not seem to be the only
>> solution. If you can think of a third alternative, that would be cool.
>
> The deep ocean is cold but empty space is even colder, only 2.7° kelvin.

That's true, but to get rid of 500 MW at that temperature takes
thousands of square km. At 20 deg K, it takes 60,000 square meters to
radiate one kW.

Keith

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 8:51 AM Paul Werbos <paul....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As Keith also wants crosspost with "extropy", I looked up what "extropy" means.
> It refers to a principle in the universe expanding life somehow.

Extropy-chat is a long-running email list, at times highly
influential, Bitcoin came out of that group of people. I met Max More
through cryonics and have posted off and on to this list since 1993.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extropianism

"Extropy" redirects here. For extropy in thermodynamics, biology and
information theory, see Negentropy.

Extropianism, also referred to as the philosophy of extropy, is an
"evolving framework of values and standards for continuously improving
the human condition".[1] Extropians believe that advances in science
and technology will some day let people live indefinitely. An
extropian may wish to contribute to this goal, e.g. by doing research
and development or by volunteering to test new technology.

Originated by a set of principles developed by the philosopher Max
More in The Principles of Extropy,[1] extropian thinking places strong
emphasis on rational thinking and on practical optimism. According to
More, these principles "do not specify particular beliefs,
technologies, or policies". Extropians share an optimistic view of the
future, expecting considerable advances in computational power, life
extension, nanotechnology and the like. Many extropians foresee the
eventual realization of indefinite lifespans or immortality, and the
recovery, thanks to future advances in biomedical technology or mind
uploading, of those whose bodies/brains have been preserved by means
of cryonics.[2][3]
^^^^^^^^

Keith

> As it happens, I do also have unique knowledge in THIS area. More precisely,
> I do NOT believe that our universe is governed by a fuzzy principle apart from the ultimate laws of physics... BUT the two theories of physics which I now consider most credible, drawing on the most advanced empirical data available, https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2021/11/q-basic-realities-of-living-in.html, DO imply that the patterns we call "life" are present mathematically in the ENTROPY FUNCTIONS, i.e. the equilibrium probability distributions of states, of the universe.
>
> As it happens, at arxiv (cond-mat) I posted the exact form of the entropy function for one of those theories. That form DEPENDS on the choice of Hamiltonian or Lagrangian function, which is a long discussion in itself, but -- it basically tends to favor locally low-energy states.
>
> WHEN I try to visualize the IMPLICATIONS of that math... it does seem likely to fit a version of the
> "extropy" idea, in which life -- even life using atoms as PART of the recipe -- WOULD naturally expand beyond just a few solar systems, and persist as long as the universe does (which might well be unbounded)... IF we give birth somehow to the use of the kind of free energy available in deep space. I am intrigued by the possibility that one of my old patent applications
> (quantum separator) MIGHT POSSIBLY do the job. But that certainly would require a lot of RD&D,
> and I doubt that FDA and others would allow me to use the new technology (for NATURAL longevity) which would let me live long enough to lead that RD&D!!
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 10:47 AM Paul Werbos <paul....@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Good morning, Bart and Keith!
>>
>> Since Keith has been promoting the idea of humans downloading themselves into... computers..
>> as a path to human personal immortality... I feel moved to get back in touch with Bart Kosko, who was in my view the number one world ... developer... of that vision, years ago.
>>
>> I hope Bart will not sue me for revealing an old story. Many years ago, Bart submitted a proposal to be honored as a Presidential Young Investigator (PYI), in the first year of that government-wide program, under President Bush. I ran the relevant NSF review, and saw how the reviews for Bart were unequivocal and supportive. After my Division (electrical engineering) discussed ALL the proposals and reviews we had reviewed, we forwarded the recommendation to the White House, with our full support. BUT THEN... I do not know what happened in the White House, which surprised us, but it seems they ordered us to deny the proposal because they did not like his politics.
>>
>> TODAY, I find that amusing in a way, because this year (10the anniversary of my leaving NSF)
>> was MY first time to vote Libertarian for President because BOTH candidates of the major parties came with baggage I would find embarrassing. (I had great positive contact with "W" in other areas, but no world leader is perfect.)
>>
>> BUT WHAT ABOUT DOWNLOADING OF OUR MINDS? This is a VERY realistic and serious issue,
>> which we really should be careful and thoughtful about. Even the libertarian community is deeply divided, like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland pointing in two directions at once.
>>
>> I do owe you a side comment: **I** have unique knowledge now of the math of "artificial general intelligence" (AGI) as illustrated in my several patents and early patent applications in that area https://patents.justia.com/inventor/paul-j-werbos, for which I won the lead technical field award of IEEE in 2022. The details and the real math matter a LOT here.
>>
>> Many people in my neighborhood (Arlington Virginia, which was initially part of DC and still is in some ways) believe that Trump will leave the Presidency by 2026, and that Vance will be led by Musk even more than Trump has been. Musk's DOGE plans are VERY well known, in technical detail with legal advice, in this neighborhood, in part because many well-connected people are personally affected.
>> (This morning, I sent family members mention of a France24 documentary which showed two human interest videos on the great purge, all free on youtube, directly reflecting members of my family, on different sides.) Musk's basic idea is to replace human decision making in agencies with AI decision-making. I suppose that humans downloaded into LLM "clones" might become eligible for positions to make the top policy decisions. But the scary thing is that Musk does not really understand the mathematical principles involved, either for AI or for Tesla technology, or even for low cost access to space. He is not like Andrew Carnegie, who was far more skilled in seeking out the best technology and in using Scottish Rite Freemasons to help verify issues like truth and the human mind.
>>
>> The best hope for now, in my view, is that MORE ENERGETIC QUALIFIED MATHEMATICALLY COMPETENT PEOPLE might link to the new USGOV (whatever it might be) to nudge us towards the
>> more benign and hopeful future tracks, including -- yes -- mega intelligent systems and "computer" hardware, designed in a more knowledgeable way. In truth, USC, where Bart works, COULD be a crucial player in making a more positive outcome possible. Now that I think of it, a major task is EDUCATING OURSELVES about crucial, little understood technical realities, AND THEN building cadres of graduate students capable of the intellectual, engineering and dissemination challenges necessary to avoid the many very deep pitfalls.
>>
>> MANY realities ...
>>
>> I am glad Bart can appreciate (and create!) science fiction, which is not always 100% true, but often
>> contains inspired truth we all really need to assimilate deeply.
>>
>> FOR EXAMPLE... the old Doctor Who TV series had a great episode on "where did the Daleks come from,"
>> which reflects key features of the math of real AGI. In that episode, the kindly old father of a lead woman
>> was kidnapped by Daleks, who then inserted his brain into a robot. (Musk is a leader in supporting related Brain Computer Interface BCI technology, for which I often send out slides from the interagency conference which persuaded me to retire from USGOV.) Because the robot had inputs and outputs from the human brain -- the sensory and motor nerves -- there were great screams at first coming from the robot. HOWEVER, the robot also had wires sending reinforcement signals to that brain. (This is exactly what Musk's neuralink system does.
>> It was amusing when he showed SOME concerns about the DARPA program which funded several groups to develop such technology, which reminded some of us of the "clone armies" of Star Wars, also very realistic in many ways. At first, he proposed using it on... wild boars or pigs... which would make great oinking clone armies.)
>> After some time affected by the new reinforcement signals, he became a normal Dalek, working effectively to eliminate all humans.
>>
>> Just as an aside.... this is basically how opioids and ALMOST ALL psychedelic drugs work as well, and also the
>> electrical "therapies for depression" now allowed by FDA. (If anyone needs it... there is a great session video from the Arizona consciousness conference I spoke at years ago. That session reported front line technical research with all the neurochemistry.)
>>
>> And so... YES, human brains often possess very important information which WOULD be useful to humanity if PROPERLY downloaded, BUT THE design of the receiving system is absolutely essential to the harm or benefit of the outcome. That kind of design work is EXTREMELY difficult to get right ... which is why
>> new design networks are essential.
>>
>> I would be happy to say more about those essential details, but this email is already more than long enough
>> for human brains to assimilate.
>>
>> Best of luck to us all. We need it.

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 7:05 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

> If ET does exist, and I don't think he does, then it would be very surprising if he was only 3000 years ahead of us because the universe is 13.8 billion years old.

> Surprising is certainly the right word, not only in the span of time
but *close* physically.  1470 ly is practically next door. 

Doesn't that make you question your theory that ET is responsible for the dimming of Tabby's star?  

 

> But no matter how unlikely something is, if it happens, that's reality.

I don't doubt the reality that Tabby's star is dimming, but I do doubt the reality of your theory about the cause of that dimming.  

>>> I doubt they are the right experts. They are, for example, not aware of directional waste heat radiation from thermal power satellite designs which would account for the impossibly low observed temperature of what they think are dust clouds.

 

>> I don't know what you mean by "impossibly low observed temperature".

> A natural dust cloud, like a comet tail, will be in thermal
equilibrium.  At the distance you can determine from the transit time,
it is getting a little over 100 W/m^2.  For incoming and outgoing to
balance, the cloud should be at 210 deg K.  It measures 65 K.

I have no idea where you got those temperature figures. Real dust clouds around stars can NOT be considered to be blackbodies, things are more complicated than that. The amount of radiation a dust cloud gives off that we are able to detect depends on the total amount of mass in the cloud, the size of the dust particles in the cloud, and the metal content of those particles. In the case of Tabby's star all those factors are very imprecisely known, the best determined is the particle size and even then all we can say is they are between 10^-6 and 10^-7 meters across; we know it can't be a solid object because there is more dimming in the blue and ultraviolet than there is in the infrared, but a solid object would dim all wavelengths equally. 

And of course the temperature of the cloud depends on how far it is from its sun which is also very imprecisely known. The result of all this is that the temperature estimate of that cloud has huge error bars, between about 100 and 1200 Kelvin.

   John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis 

heb

    

 

[Lawrence Crowell]

All of this is terribly speculative with things that are unlikely to happen. The issue about downloading minds into computers may be resolved by realizing that a scan of a brain and the mapping of brain states takes time. By the time you reconstruct a mind in a computer the original mind may have progressed beyond that point, so the reconstructed mind in the machine is effectively a different mind. I rather doubt these things will happen in a practical sense. I also doubt that ET beings create mega-structures or planet sized computers or brains. If it does happen it might be in one out of a trillion galaxies. It will not be done by us. I suspect we will be off the Darwinian game table in the rather near future.

LC

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[Keith Henson]

I could go through the math and logic starting with the size of the
dips and the transit times plus why I was strongly biased against
megastructures and why very reluctantly came to the conclusion I did,
plus some of the local long-term consequences for humanity where this
line of thinking led regardless of what we are observing. But it does
not seem to be worthwhile to do so.

I freely acknowledge my tentative conclusions could be wrong, and hope
they are because they may have dire consequences for the future of
humans and our AI offspring. I understand why people don't want to
deal with this possibility and I don't blame you, The local problems
are enough to saturate our worry centers.

Just FYI, the thing that pushed me over the edge was reports that
there are 23 other stars in a cluster that also have light dips like
Tabby's star. I lack the imagination to understand this as anything
but intentional or to dismiss it. The closest one is 511 ly. The
spreading seems to be around 1/3 of c. Either we will go there, or
they will come to us and we will know. If we see Vista being turned
into a data center we will know. Not that we could do anything about
it.

Keith

[John Clark]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2025 at 2:06 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Just FYI, the thing that pushed me over the edge was reports that
there are 23 other stars in a cluster that also have light dips like
Tabby's star.  I lack the imagination to understand this as anything
but intentional or to dismiss it.

As the late great Carl Sagan was fond of saying, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", and nobody has been able to confirm or repeat that observation. So the evidence is not very extraordinary.  

[John Clark]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2025 at 11:25 AM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

> The issue about downloading minds into computers may be resolved by realizing that a scan of a brain and the mapping of brain states takes time. By the time you reconstruct a mind in a computer the original mind may have progressed beyond that point, so the reconstructed mind in the machine is effectively a different mind. I rather doubt these things will happen in a practical sense.

You're talking about fast non-destructive scanning of the brain and I'm not sure that's possible;  a slower destructive scanning is difficult but not impossible. The following is one possible scenario: 

More cell damage occurs during the thawing process than the freezing process, and if ASC chemical fixation is used there is no brain shrinkage and the synaptic connection information is preserved; we know this because beautiful electron microscopic pictures have been taken of brain cells preserved in this way. Then the frozen brain could be disassembled from the outside in, one very thin layer at a time, and the information about where and how strong all the synaptic connections in that layer could be recorded, and then work could start on the next layer and you keep going until there is nothing left of the brain.  After all the information in all 10^14 synapses have been recorded that information is later translated into electronics and the uploading has been completed.  

OK OK I admit the above scenario may seem like a crazy fantasy but it should be remembered that, unlike perpetual motion or faster than light spaceships or traveling to the past, it does NOT need to invoke new science to become a reality, all it needs is improved engineering. 

> I also doubt that ET beings create mega-structures or planet sized computers or brains. 

I too think ET is very unlikely. 

 

> If it does happen it might be in one out of a trillion galaxies. It will not be done by us. I suspect we will be off the Darwinian game table in the rather near future.

I very much doubt biological humans will still be around a century from now and perhaps not a decade from now, but I have some hope that Mr. Jupiter Brain will have at least a little affection for us, after all He wouldn't exist except for us, so maybe He will give us access to a small (by His standards) server so that a few billion uploads can be run in a pleasant virtual world. 

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

5oo

[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2025 at 8:25 AM Lawrence Crowell
<goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> All of this is terribly speculative with things that are unlikely to happen. The issue about downloading minds into computers may be resolved by realizing that a scan of a brain and the mapping of brain states takes time. By the time you reconstruct a mind in a computer the original mind may have progressed beyond that point, so the reconstructed mind in the machine is effectively a different mind. I rather doubt these things will happen in a practical sense. I also doubt that ET beings create mega-structures or planet sized computers or brains.

From the size of the light dips, whatever is blocking the light is
hundreds of times the area of the Earth. But ignoring ETs, people
have already been talking about data centers in space that are miles
in scale. If you are arguing that we can't do this, I would like to
know why you think so.

Keith

> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/extropolis/CAAFA0qrpFTFk8gQ0W4h4qth-%2BOJxau9J%3DbC4tHqH7-woTKGJ7g%40mail.gmail.com.

[Keith Henson]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 4:56 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Apr 17, 2025 at 11:25 AM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> > The issue about downloading minds into computers may be resolved by realizing that a scan of a brain and the mapping of brain states takes time. By the time you reconstruct a mind in a computer the original mind may have progressed beyond that point, so the reconstructed mind in the machine is effectively a different mind. I rather doubt these things will happen in a practical sense.

Minds are always changing, you are not exactly the same person in the
morning you were when you went to sleep. So what? At a practical
level, I don't think it is worth being concerned about.

>
> You're talking about fast non-destructive scanning of the brain and I'm not sure that's possible; a slower destructive scanning is difficult but not impossible. The following is one possible scenario:

I don't have the slightest interest in a destructive brain scan.
That's like insisting that the original copy of a file be destroyed
when you make a copy. Poor archival process, and not needed. There
is no reason I can see why all the structures in a brain could not be
mapped out by infiltrating it with nanomachines. If there is an
argument against this, I would like to know what it is.

Keith

> More cell damage occurs during the thawing process than the freezing process, and if ASC chemical fixation is used there is no brain shrinkage and the synaptic connection information is preserved; we know this because beautiful electron microscopic pictures have been taken of brain cells preserved in this way. Then the frozen brain could be disassembled from the outside in, one very thin layer at a time, and the information about where and how strong all the synaptic connections in that layer could be recorded, and then work could start on the next layer and you keep going until there is nothing left of the brain. After all the information in all 10^14 synapses have been recorded that information is later translated into electronics and the uploading has been completed.
>
> OK OK I admit the above scenario may seem like a crazy fantasy but it should be remembered that, unlike perpetual motion or faster than light spaceships or traveling to the past, it does NOT need to invoke new science to become a reality, all it needs is improved engineering.
>
>> > I also doubt that ET beings create mega-structures or planet sized computers or brains.
>
>
> I too think ET is very unlikely.
>
>>
>> > If it does happen it might be in one out of a trillion galaxies. It will not be done by us. I suspect we will be off the Darwinian game table in the rather near future.
>
>
> I very much doubt biological humans will still be around a century from now and perhaps not a decade from now, but I have some hope that Mr. Jupiter Brain will have at least a little affection for us, after all He wouldn't exist except for us, so maybe He will give us access to a small (by His standards) server so that a few billion uploads can be run in a pleasant virtual world.
>
> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
> 5oo
>
>>

> --
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[John Clark]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 2:02 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't have the slightest interest in a destructive brain scan.

There's no disputing matters of taste. As for me I'd prefer a destructive scanning that didn't corrupt information over a non-destructive scanning that did. 

 

> There is no reason I can see why all the structures in a brain could not be
mapped out by infiltrating it with nanomachines. 

That might be possible but it would be slower, harder and more expensive than a destructive scan, we are both ALCOR clients and if we're lucky enough to be revived I don't think we will have much say about how it was done.  

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

mt4

[Keith Henson]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 11:18 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 2:02 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > I don't have the slightest interest in a destructive brain scan.
>
> There's no disputing matters of taste. As for me I'd prefer a destructive scanning that didn't corrupt information over a non-destructive scanning that did.

You might convince me that destructive scanning preserves information
better than non-destructive scan. Can you make such a case?

>>
>> > There is no reason I can see why all the structures in a brain could not be
>> mapped out by infiltrating it with nanomachines.
>
> That might be possible but it would be slower, harder and more expensive than a destructive scan,

I am curious why you would be concerned about slower. As to harder,
it's not like humans would be doing this, as long as it is automated,
who cares about harder or expensive?

BTW, have you ever seen a destructive scan of a brain? The one I know
a little about uses a vibrating diamond knife and slices off the
(mouse) brain while collecting data. It is not fast, and if anything
goes wrong, you lose the data. Presumably advanced technology would
do better but between slicing and infiltration, I can't say which
would be faster, not that speed matters. But if you don't have to,
destroying the original is a poor archive procedure.

we are both ALCOR clients and if we're lucky enough to be revived I
don't think we will have much say about how it was done.

You can write specifications into your contract. One Alcor patient
is/was blind. He specified that he is not to be revived until the
procedure can give him sight.

But you are essentially correct.

Keith

[John Clark]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 10:09 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> There's no disputing matters of taste. As for me I'd prefer a destructive scanning that didn't corrupt information over a non-destructive scanning that did.

> You might convince me that destructive scanning preserves information
better than non-destructive scan.  Can you make such a case?

I can make a moderately strong case that destructive brain scaning has already occurred a few times, but nothing even close to a non-destructive scan exists today. Of course both will improve in the future but destructive scanning has a significant head start.  Today several human brains have been chemically fixed with ASC , sliced with a diamond saw into many very thin slices, the slices were photographed with a high power microscope, and then computers were used to analyze the photographs and trace out the neural connections. The last two steps were the slowest and the most expensive, and those are also the two steps that are likely to improve the fastest in the coming years; and an organization such as ALCOR need not worry about those two steps because that is a problem for the future. 

Fun fact: one of the brains that were treated in this way was that of a convicted murderer who had been executed by lethal injection. 

>>> There is no reason I can see why all the structures in a brain could not be mapped out by infiltrating it with nanomachines.

>> That might be possible but it would be slower, harder and more expensive than a destructive scan.

> I am curious why you would be concerned about slower. 

If you're going to infuse a living human brain with nanomachines to record how things are wired up and expect the brain to continue to function normally then you're severely limited in the number of nanomachines you could put into that brain, and that limitation is going to slow things down. I might add that if a mechanic is trying to change the spark plugs on an engine his task becomes much slower and more difficult if he is not allowed to turn that engine off while he works; it also makes it more likely that he will make an error. 

> it's not like humans would be doing this, as long as it is automated, who cares about harder or expensive?

 We know for a fact that ASC preserves the synaptic neural connections in the brain better than the procedure ALCOR currently uses because today we can detect those connections if ASC is used but cannot do so with ALCOR's procedure. We have some reason to be hopeful that ALCOR's procedure also preserves that information and it's just scrambled up more, but we do NOT know that for a fact. And why make things more difficult for future technology to bring us back if that difficulty can be avoided? 

This is what ALCOR had to say about ASC back in 2018 and as far as I know they haven't said anything about it since: 

"A new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC)  provides strong proof that brains can be preserved well enough at cryogenic temperatures for neural connectivity (the connectome) to be completely visualized. [...] Current brain vitrification methods without fixation lead to dehydration. Dehydration has effects on tissue contrast that make it difficult to see whether the connectome is preserved or not with electron microscopy. That does not mean that dehydration is especially damaging, nor that fixation with toxic aldehyde does less damage."

ALCOR's position on brains preservation

I would maintain that the last sentence in the above is factually incorrect. ASC DOES cause less damage than ALCOR's current method. That's why we are able to trace the neural connections with today's technology with one method but not with the other. The damage caused by ALCOR's method may not be irreplaceable, the information may just be scrambled more than it is with ASC and require Mr. Jupiter Brain to jump through more hoops to recover it, but maybe not, so why take the chance?   

>> we are both ALCOR clients and if we're lucky enough to be revived I don't think we will have much say about how it was done.

> You can write specifications into your contract.  One Alcor patient
is/was blind.  He specified that he is not to be revived until the
procedure can give him sight. But you are essentially correct.

That seems unnecessary, if the future people have the technology to repair a freeze damaged human brain they certainly have the technology to restore his sight. I wrote no specifications in my ALCOR contract because I thought it unlikely that anybody would pay attention to them and if they did they might turn out to be counterproductive because I have only a hazy understanding of what the post singularity world will be like. For example, if somebody wrote that they do not wish to come back as an upload and that request was honored I don't think Mr. Jupiter Brain would bring him back at all.  

John K Clark   See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

288

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 9:33 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Apr 17, 2025 at 8:25 AM Lawrence Crowell
<goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> All of this is terribly speculative with things that are unlikely to happen. The issue about downloading minds into computers may be resolved by realizing that a scan of a brain and the mapping of brain states takes time. By the time you reconstruct a mind in a computer the original mind may have progressed beyond that point, so the reconstructed mind in the machine is effectively a different mind. I rather doubt these things will happen in a practical sense. I also doubt that ET beings create mega-structures or planet sized computers or brains.

From the size of the light dips, whatever is blocking the light is
hundreds of times the area of the Earth.  But ignoring ETs, people
have already been talking about data centers in space that are miles
in scale.  If you are arguing that we can't do this, I would like to
know why you think so.

Keith

Before we get into extreme speculations about alien megastructures, we need to focus more on bio-signature on extrasolar planets or maybe finding biological activity in the solar system. The star K2-18 with a planet K2-18b has 3-sigma signatures of dimethyl sulfide NH_2-S-NH_2. On Earth this is associated with microbes in the ocean and there is no known way this compound can occur abiotically. Other data of course is needed before we can conclude biology has been found. Maybe the interiors of Jovian and Cronian moons have simple biological activity. Subsurface water on Mars may still hold life that may have emerged 3.5 billion years ago. 

We are not going to have data structures in space that are kilometers in scale any day soon. The SpaceX idea of colonizing Mars is batshit madness. The large SpaceX rocket might be a decent heavy lift vehicle, but nobody is going to Mars in that. The whole idea of space colonization is problematic, for nobody has demonstrated how that can result in a positive feedback or return on energy, material or capital investments.

LC

 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/extropolis/CAPiwVB71Z4CzFSaqcpwrs3Lu_n9x7faOEkHohozxCWazfDz4bw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Keith Henson]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2025 at 5:03 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 10:09 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> >> There's no disputing matters of taste. As for me I'd prefer a destructive scanning that didn't corrupt information over a non-destructive scanning that did.
>>
>> > You might convince me that destructive scanning preserves information
>> better than non-destructive scan. Can you make such a case?
>
> I can make a moderately strong case that destructive brain scaning has already occurred a few times, but nothing even close to a non-destructive scan exists today. Of course both will improve in the future but destructive scanning has a significant head start. Today several human brains have been chemically fixed with ASC , sliced with a diamond saw into many very thin slices, the slices were photographed with a high power microscope, and then computers were used to analyze the photographs and trace out the neural connections.

I am a long way from thinking that the wiring diagram is enough to get
a person back from suspension. From what we know, synaptic weight is
essential to memory. I think without this data, which as far as I
know is not visible, you get back a blank brain with no memory. I
don't know about anyone else, but to me, a no-memory on revival
cryonic suspension seems pointless. Your case would be much improved
if you could show that memory could be recovered from a scanned brain
slice.

> The last two steps were the slowest and the most expensive, and those are also the two steps that are likely to improve the fastest in the coming years; and an organization such as ALCOR need not worry about those two steps because that is a problem for the future.
>
> Fun fact: one of the brains that were treated in this way was that of a convicted murderer who had been executed by lethal injection.
>
>>>> >>>
There is no reason I can see why all the structures in a brain could
not be mapped out by infiltrating it with nanomachines.
>>>
>>> >> That might be possible but it would be slower, harder and more expensive than a destructive scan.
>>
>> > I am curious why you would be concerned about slower.
>
> If you're going to infuse a living human brain with nanomachines to record how things are wired up and expect the brain to continue to function normally then you're severely limited in the number of nanomachines you could put into that brain,

Given the relative sizes of nerve cells and nanomachines, I doubt
that's much of a limit. But it is something we can put numbers on.
Brains function fine after swelling 5-10 percent. How many machines
is there room for? A bigger problem might be getting the connection
and synaptic weights out of the brain. I have given a little thought
to this. The reason you want to go slowly is to keep the waste heat
down.

[From the Clinic Seed story]

She was mildly distressed that she now had to voice talk to Suskulan,
who appeared as a projection, instead of "talking" directly to his
spirit in the spirit world she had inhabited. Then she realized from
her new knowledge there was a way she could if she took a bit of the
clinic with her. However, there wasn't much time to before her
parents came.

"Can I come back to visit even if I am not hurt?" she asked.

"Yes. Anytime I don't have another patient."

"May I take the clinic's interface with me?"

"There is nothing so addictive . . ." thought Suskulan.

"You may." Part of the cloud of nanomachines that had just left
Zaba's brain returned as a momentary haze. Since they retained their
memory of where they had been it was a matter of a few minutes before
the machines reestablished their monitoring posts in Zaba's brain.

"I missed not being able to talk to you in the spirit world." Zaba
said without voicing. A wire frame image in Zaba's visual cortex
overlaid the physical projected image of Suskulan.

"Spirit talk does not reach as far as your garden." Suskulan warned her.

Zaba lay down on the repair table that was now at the bottom of the
elevator shaft. The elevator lifted it into its place in the clinic.
Zaba was treated to seeing the rapidly thinning utility fog image of
her body that had comforted her family for the last ten days before
she merged into her image.

The nanomachine haze that had fogged her image and now her real body
withdrew into the low table. She greeted her family as they came into
the clinic and in voice talk said goodbye to the image of an old man
Suskulan was projecting. Then they stepped through the clinic's
keyhole door to where the other members of the tata were waiting for a
joyous celebration of the healing of Zaba.

Suskulan sent off a strictly factual report. There were no replies
this time, but perhaps that was due to the high report traffic.

Her family had visited every day, but they were still delighted and
relieved that Zaba was back with no visible effects from being shot.
Her parents had been worried that her value as a bride might have been
damaged, but none of the tata seemed to be concerned, only very proud
of the growing powers of their clinic Suskulan. (The elders had long
since wildly inflated the value of the fetish they had traded for the
clinic seed.)

Zaba had been warned not to flaunt her new knowledge to adults and
with Suskulan's help had built temporary inhibitions into her mental
processes. She was under no such injunction toward the other
children, though. They were absolutely fascinated and wanted the
ability to talk to Suskulan in the spirit world as well. In spirit
world talk Zaba asked Suskulan if he would give the others an
"interface" like she had.

"Yes, though not in one day like I did with you. It takes several
days to a week for an interface to establish itself unless you are
very cold."

[end quote]

> and that limitation is going to slow things down. I might add that if a mechanic is trying to change the spark plugs on an engine his task becomes much slower and more difficult if he is not allowed to turn that engine off while he works; it also makes it more likely that he will make an error.

This is not a problem since low temperature will shut down a
biological brain just fine.

With cryonics patients at LN2, you are starting with a shut-down brain.

>> > it's not like humans would be doing this, as long as it is automated, who cares about harder or expensive?
>
>
> We know for a fact that ASC preserves the synaptic neural connections in the brain better than the procedure ALCOR currently uses because today we can detect those connections if ASC is used but cannot do so with ALCOR's procedure. We have some reason to be hopeful that ALCOR's procedure also preserves that information and it's just scrambled up more, but we do NOT know that for a fact. And why make things more difficult for future technology to bring us back if that difficulty can be avoided?
>

Do you have any pointers to ASC preserving synaptic information? That
would be very interesting, essentially reading out memory. As far as
I know (and I may be out of date) they can see synaptic nodes, but
pictures do not disclose the weighting of a node.

> This is what ALCOR had to say about ASC back in 2018 and as far as I know they haven't said anything about it since:
>
> "A new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC) provides strong proof that brains can be preserved well enough at cryogenic temperatures for neural connectivity (the connectome) to be completely visualized. [...] Current brain vitrification methods without fixation lead to dehydration. Dehydration has effects on tissue contrast that make it difficult to see whether the connectome is preserved or not with electron microscopy. That does not mean that dehydration is especially damaging, nor that fixation with toxic aldehyde does less damage."
>
> ALCOR's position on brains preservation
>
> I would maintain that the last sentence in the above is factually incorrect. ASC DOES cause less damage than ALCOR's current method. That's why we are able to trace the neural connections with today's technology with one method but not with the other. The damage caused by ALCOR's method may not be irreplaceable, the information may just be scrambled more than it is with ASC and require Mr. Jupiter Brain to jump through more hoops to recover it, but maybe not, so why take the chance?
>
>>> >> we are both ALCOR clients and if we're lucky enough to be revived I don't think we will have much say about how it was done.
>>
>> > You can write specifications into your contract. One Alcor patient
>> is/was blind. He specified that he is not to be revived until the
>> procedure can give him sight. But you are essentially correct.
>
>
> That seems unnecessary, if the future people have the technology to repair a freeze damaged human brain they certainly have the technology to restore his sight.

It is not a matter of restoration, the patient was blind from birth.
He was one of those blinded by preme oxygen treatment.

>I wrote no specifications in my ALCOR contract because I thought it unlikely that anybody would pay attention to them and if they did they might turn out to be counterproductive because I have only a hazy understanding of what the post singularity world will be like. For example, if somebody wrote that they do not wish to come back as an upload and that request was honored I don't think Mr. Jupiter Brain would bring him back at all.

Possible. However, I think repairing brains/bodies is on a par with
uploading. I suspect that uploaded humans will find that state more
desirable than the physical state, leading to a population collapse.

Keith

[John Clark]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2025 at 11:39 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

> I don't know about anyone else, but to me, a no-memory on revival cryonic suspension seems pointless.

I certainly agree with you about that!  

 

> I am a long way from thinking that the wiring diagram is enough to get a person back from suspension. 

I never said it was. 

 

> From what we know, synaptic weight is essential to memory. 

Yes. The wiring diagram is necessary but not sufficient, but I think it's a reasonable extrapolation to say that if a frozen brain that has been infused with cryoprotectant and ASC does a better job at preserving wiring information than a brain that is infused with cryoprotectant alone (and we have strong evidence that it does) then it probably does a better job at preserving synaptic weights too.  

> Your case would be much improved if you could show that memory could be recovered from a scanned brain slice.

I am not suggesting that ALCOR should start slicing up the brains of their frozen patients, but I am suggesting that those brain slices provide powerful evidence that ASC plus cryoprotectant scrambles information less than cryoprotectant alone does. The exact method Mr. Jupiter Brain chooses to extract that information I don't know so I will leave that to His discretion, He will know much more about that than I do, although I'm certain Nanotechnology will be involved, and I think it would be wise to do everything we can to make His job easier.

>  I suspect that uploaded humans will find that state more desirable than the physical state 

Then why did you say you had no interest in uploading if it required a destructive scan?

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

jaa 

> > We know for a fact that ASC preserves the synaptic neural connections in the brain better than the procedure ALCOR currently uses because today we can detect those connections if ASC is used but cannot do so with ALCOR's procedure. We have some reason to be hopeful that ALCOR's procedure also preserves that information and it's just scrambled up more, but we do NOT know that for a fact. And why make things more difficult for future technology to bring us back if that difficulty can be avoided?

> Do you have any pointers to ASC preserving synaptic information?  That
would be very interesting, essentially reading out memory.  As far as
I know (and I may be out of date) they can see synaptic nodes, but
pictures do not disclose the weighting of a node.

This is what ALCOR had to say about ASC back in 2018 and as far as I know they haven't said anything about it since:

> "A new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC)  provides strong proof that brains can be preserved well enough at cryogenic temperatures for neural connectivity (the connectome) to be completely visualized. [...] Current brain vitrification methods without fixation lead to dehydration. Dehydration has effects on tissue contrast that make it difficult to see whether the connectome is preserved or not with electron microscopy. That does not mean that dehydration is especially damaging, nor that fixation with toxic aldehyde does less damage."

> ALCOR's position on brains preservation

> I would maintain that the last sentence in the above is factually incorrect. ASC DOES cause less damage than ALCOR's current method. That's why we are able to trace the neural connections with today's technology with one method but not with the other. The damage caused by ALCOR's method may not be irreplaceable, the information may just be scrambled more than it is with ASC and require Mr. Jupiter Brain to jump through more hoops to recover it, but maybe not, so why take the chance?

>>> >> we are both ALCOR clients and if we're lucky enough to be revived I don't think we will have much say about how it was done.

>> > You can write specifications into your contract.  One Alcor patient
>> is/was blind.  He specified that he is not to be revived until the
>> procedure can give him sight. But you are essentially correct.


> That seems unnecessary, if the future people have the technology to repair a freeze damaged human brain they certainly have the technology to restore his sight.

It is not a matter of restoration, the patient was blind from birth.
He was one of those blinded by preme oxygen treatment.

>I wrote no specifications in my ALCOR contract because I thought it unlikely that anybody would pay attention to them and if they did they might turn out to be counterproductive because I have only a hazy understanding of what the post singularity world will be like. For example, if somebody wrote that they do not wish to come back as an upload and that request was honored I don't think Mr. Jupiter Brain would bring him back at all.

Possible.  However, I think repairing brains/bodies is on a par with
uploading.  I suspect that uploaded humans will find that state more
desirable than the physical state, leading to a population collapse.

Keith

> John K Clark   See what's on my new list at  Extropolis
>

[Will Steinberg]

The mind is 4d, if you freeze it in time you lose the information.  Not to mention the electrical potentials and other things that will change or disappear upon freezing:  It’s surely impossible.  Plus you will be dead

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[John Clark]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2025 at 1:52 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The mind is 4d

The mind is what the brain does. 

 

> if you freeze it in time you lose the information. 

If you freeze a mind in time then the mind isn't doing anything, if you unfreeze it properly then it will start doing things again because consciousness is the way information feels when it is being processed intelligently.  

 

> Not to mention the electrical potentials and other things that will change or disappear upon freezing:

Electrical potential is far too ephemeral to be responsible for long-term memory.  

> Plus you will be dead

As I said before, there's being dead and then there's being information theoretically dead.  

Information-Theoretic Death

 > It’s surely impossible. 

 It's not impossible. And don't call me Shirley.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

sdc

[Will Steinberg]

Well unfortunately we don’t have a way to “freeze [anything] in time.  Cryogenics aren’t magic time brakes, they gravely affect the brain.

I think it’s not at all conclusive that electrical potentials don’t have a significant effect on LTM and selfhood.  

“Heartbeats are far too ephemeral to be responsible for keeping you alive”—we run on time-dependent, “ephemeral” qualities that literally kill you if they stop.  There is no conclusive reason to believe that the brain doesn’t operate the same way.

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[John Clark]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2025 at 5:36 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Well unfortunately we don’t have a way to “freeze [anything] in time. 

Actually we can. At liquid nitrogen temperatures, 77° kelvin, chemical reactions are slowed down by a factor of about 10^20 compared to room temperature. That's a billion trillion.  

 

> Cryogenics aren’t magic time brakes, they gravely affect the brain.

It's not magic, it's science. And yes, temperatures like that do affect the brain because the brain is a chemical machine and the machine slows down by a factor of a billion trillion when frozen by liquid nitrogen.    

> I think it’s not at all conclusive that electrical potentials don’t have a significant effect on LTM and selfhood.

If you believe that the reason you can remember being in the first grade is because a pattern of electrical charges in your brain has remained unchanged since then ... well ... there's some swamp land I'd like to sell you .

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

8zw

[Keith Henson]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2025 at 10:47 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
snip

> Yes. The wiring diagram is necessary but not sufficient, but I think it's a reasonable extrapolation to say that if a frozen brain that has been infused with cryoprotectant and ASC does a better job at preserving wiring information than a brain that is infused with cryoprotectant alone (and we have strong evidence that it does) then it probably does a better job at preserving synaptic weights too.

You might be right. It's my opinion that crosslinking all the
proteins in a synapse would make examining them harder, possibly
impossible. But that's just my opinion.

>> > Your case would be much improved if you could show that memory could be recovered from a scanned brain slice.
>
> I am not suggesting that ALCOR should start slicing up the brains of their frozen patients, but I am suggesting that those brain slices provide powerful evidence that ASC plus cryoprotectant scrambles information less than cryoprotectant alone does. The exact method Mr. Jupiter Brain chooses to extract that information I don't know so I will leave that to His discretion, He will know much more about that than I do, although I'm certain Nanotechnology will be involved, and I think it would be wise to do everything we can to make His job easier.
>
>> > I suspect that uploaded humans will find that state more desirable than the physical state
>
> Then why did you say you had no interest in uploading if it required a destructive scan?

I don't like destroying original material. There is no reason I can
see that uploading should not be reversible. Destroying the original
makes this no longer an option.

[Keith Henson]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2025 at 10:52 AM Will Steinberg
<steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The mind is 4d, if you freeze it in time you lose the information.

No doubt. It takes time to consolidate memory. People who have been
subject to cold water drowning and are revived lose several hours of
memory.

> Not to mention the electrical potentials and other things that will change or disappear upon freezing: It’s surely impossible. Plus you will be dead

30 years ago Alcor took dogs down to 4 deg C for several hours. This
totally eliminated any brain activity. After they were revived, they
were the same dogs who remembered where their food bowl was.

I find it interesting that you argue cryonics is impossible on this list.

Keith Henson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson

> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/extropolis/CAKrqSyHiZT-XB4q06hQt_vv%2BeOdDH2BMoOE6%3Dt7t5mkPyFS4Ag%40mail.gmail.com.

[Will Steinberg]

I don’t think cryonics is impossible, but I think that uploading from a cryogenically frozen brain is improbable without some kind or adjunct information.

The dog thing is interesting but I would be curious what exactly “no brain activity” means.  Because I think that very small potentials could essentially act like a backup battery does, and it might just appear as noise on an EEG or similar.  I tend to err on the side or caution and assume we know very little about anything

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[John Clark]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2025 at 7:25 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The wiring diagram is necessary but not sufficient, but I think it's a reasonable extrapolation to say that if a frozen brain that has been infused with cryoprotectant and ASC does a better job at preserving wiring information than a brain that is infused with cryoprotectant alone (and we have strong evidence that it does) then it probably does a better job at preserving synaptic weights too.

I am not suggesting that ALCOR should start slicing up the brains of their frozen patients, but I am suggesting that those brain slices provide powerful evidence that ASC plus cryoprotectant scrambles information less than cryoprotectant alone does. The exact method Mr. Jupiter Brain chooses to extract that information I don't know so I will leave that to His discretion, He will know much more about that than I do, although I'm certain Nanotechnology will be involved, and I think it would be wise to do everything we can to make His job easier.

> You might be right.  It's my opinion that crosslinking all the proteins in a synapse would make examining them harder, possibly impossible.  But that's just my opinion. [...] Your case would be much improved if you could show that memory could be recovered from a scanned brain slice.

I asked Claude about that and this is what he said:  

 "Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation (ASC) is particularly effective at preserving many of the structural elements associated with memory storage in the brain. Here's what ASC typically preserves:

ASC generally preserves well:

• The overall connectome (the map of neural connections)
• Synaptic structures, including pre- and post-synaptic densities
• Dendritic spine morphology and distribution
• Cell membranes and general cellular architecture
• Many proteins (though cross-linked by the fixation process)

ASC may partially preserve:

• Some molecular information, though chemically modified by the aldehyde fixation
• Spatial relationships between subcellular components
• General epigenetic states (though with some degradation)" 

But Claude also says ASC does not do a good job at preserving dynamic processes or the exact electrical properties of neurons, of course neither does conventional cryopreservation, however that doesn't bother me very much because I don't see how exact electrical or dynamic processes can have much to do with long-term biological memory. 

According to Claude ASC also does not do a good job at preserving "the native conformational state of many proteins (due to cross-linking)", however it does preserve the amino acid sequence of a protein and with that information, thanks to recent advancements in AI, we can predict what that protein must've folded up into when it was in a living biological brain before it got cross linked with ASC. And if we can do it now Mr. Jupiter Crain certainly will be able to do it in the future. 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

brk

 

 

>> >  I suspect that uploaded humans will find that state more desirable than the physical state
>
> Then why did you say you had no interest in uploading if it required a destructive scan?

I don't like destroying original material.  There is no reason I can
see that uploading should not be reversible.  Destroying the original
makes this no longer an option.

>> > > We know for a fact that ASC preserves the synaptic neural connections in the brain better than the procedure ALCOR currently uses because today we can detect those connections if ASC is used but cannot do so with ALCOR's procedure. We have some reason to be hopeful that ALCOR's procedure also preserves that information and it's just scrambled up more, but we do NOT know that for a fact. And why make things more difficult for future technology to bring us back if that difficulty can be avoided?

>> This is what ALCOR had to say about ASC back in 2018 and as far as I know they haven't said anything about it since:

 "A new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC)  provides strong proof that brains can be preserved well enough at cryogenic temperatures for neural connectivity (the connectome) to be completely visualized. [...] Current brain vitrification methods without fixation lead to dehydration. Dehydration has effects on tissue contrast that make it difficult to see whether the connectome is preserved or not with electron microscopy. That does not mean that dehydration is especially damaging, nor that fixation with toxic aldehyde does less damage."
>>
>> > ALCOR's position on brains preservation
>>
>> > I would maintain that the last sentence in the above is factually incorrect. ASC DOES cause less damage than ALCOR's current method. That's why we are able to trace the neural connections with today's technology with one method but not with the other. The damage caused by ALCOR's method may not be irreplaceable, the information may just be scrambled more than it is with ASC and require Mr. Jupiter Brain to jump through more hoops to recover it, but maybe not, so why take the chance?

 

>

>> >I wrote no specifications in my ALCOR contract because I thought it unlikely that anybody would pay attention to them and if they did they might turn out to be counterproductive because I have only a hazy understanding of what the post singularity world will be like. For example, if somebody wrote that they do not wish to come back as an upload and that request was honored I don't think Mr. Jupiter Brain would bring him back at all.
>

>> >> >> > More cell damage occurs during the thawing process than the freezing process, and if ASC chemical fixation is used there is no brain shrinkage and the synaptic connection information is preserved; we know this because beautiful electron microscopic pictures have been taken of brain cells preserved in this way. Then the frozen brain could be disassembled from the outside in, one very thin layer at a time, and the information about where and how strong all the synaptic connections in that layer could be recorded, and then work could start on the next layer and you keep going until there is nothing left of the brain.  After all the information in all 10^14 synapses have been recorded that information is later translated into electronics and the uploading has been completed.
 OK OK I admit the above scenario may seem like a crazy fantasy but it should be remembered that, unlike perpetual motion or faster than light spaceships or traveling to the past, it does NOT need to invoke new science to become a reality, all it needs is improved engineering.

[Lawrence Crowell]

Cryonics is a modern, more advanced technological version of what the Egyptians did with mummification. People frozen in liquid nitrogen are simply dead.

LC

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 8:13 AM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Cryonics is a modern, more advanced technological version of what the Egyptians did with mummificat

The ancient Egyptians carefully preserved every part of the body EXCEPT for the brain, they used an iron hook to drag the brain out of the nose in pieces and threw it away; modern cryonics uses a somewhat different approach. 

 

> People frozen in liquid nitrogen are simply dead.

Yes but being simply dead is a potentially reversible condition, however being information theoretically dead is not. There is of course no guarantee of success but at liquid nitrogen temperatures chemical reactions are slowed down by a factor of about 10^20, so your chances will be higher than if you let your brain be burned up in a furnace or be eaten by worms.  

John K Clark

f76

 

 

On Sat, Apr 19, 2025 at 12:48 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Apr 19, 2025 at 11:39 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

> I don't know about anyone else, but to me, a no-memory on revival cryonic suspension seems pointless.

I certainly agree with you about that!  

 

> I am a long way from thinking that the wiring diagram is enough to get a person back from suspension. 

I never said it was. 

 

> From what we know, synaptic weight is essential to memory. 

Yes. The wiring diagram is necessary but not sufficient, but I think it's a reasonable extrapolation to say that if a frozen brain that has been infused with cryoprotectant and ASC does a better job at preserving wiring information than a brain that is infused with cryoprotectant alone (and we have strong evidence that it does) then it probably does a better job at preserving synaptic weights too.  

> Your case would be much improved if you could show that memory could be recovered from a scanned brain slice.

I am not suggesting that ALCOR should start slicing up the brains of their frozen patients, but I am suggesting that those brain slices provide powerful evidence that ASC plus cryoprotectant scrambles information less than cryoprotectant alone does. The exact method Mr. Jupiter Brain chooses to extract that information I don't know so I will leave that to His discretion, He will know much more about that than I do, although I'm certain Nanotechnology will be involved, and I think it would be wise to do everything we can to make His job easier.

>  I suspect that uploaded humans will find that state more desirable than the physical state 

Then why did you say you had no interest in uploading if it required a destructive scan?

[John Clark]

Information-Theoretic Death

John K Clark

[Will Steinberg]

I suggest making peace (or at least detente) with death.  Hell I’m 30 and I don’t expect to be saved, nor would I like to participate in any creepy experiment putting me in the crosshairs of body snatchers or mind snatchers.

Death probably isn’t so bad.  Have you considered believing in an afterlife?  It’s about as unfounded as believing we can seamlessly transfer your experience to a computer any time soon or ever, but on the plus side, you can already believe it right now

On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 3:08 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

Information-Theoretic Death

John K Clark

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 3:14 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I suggest making peace (or at least detente) with death. 

"Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light."  Dylan Thomas.

John K Clark

[Will Steinberg]

It’s inevitable even with uploading though, so still best to make peace

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[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 12:14 PM Will Steinberg
<steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I suggest making peace (or at least detente) with death. Hell I’m 30 and I don’t expect to be saved, nor would I like to participate in any creepy experiment putting me in the crosshairs of body snatchers or mind snatchers.

Will, I don't expect to influence you on this topic. People almost
always figure out some accommodation with mortality at some point
after childhood and the memes tend to be as fixed in their brains as
the imprinting of bird chicks on parents.

But if you are 30, chances are at least fair that you will have to
refuse cheap, effective life extension treatments to die "naturally."

> Death probably isn’t so bad.

Ah . .. how many deaths have you attended? When someone dies what
they knew becomes as inaccessible as a burned down library.

> Have you considered believing in an afterlife?

Have you considered how much I have written about religious memes and
why humans were selected to be susceptible to irrational beliefs?

> It’s about as unfounded as believing we can seamlessly transfer your experience to a computer any time soon or ever, but on the plus side, you can already believe it right now.

And it is a good day to believe in the Easter Bunny.

Keith

>
> On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 3:08 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Information-Theoretic Death
>>
>> John K Clark
>>
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[Will Steinberg]

Is there a real reason you feel it is irrational?  Perhaps unfalsifiable but you would be surprised at the amount of unfalsifiable things people think on a daily basis.  It is of course also a hallmark of logic that there are always true statements that cannot be proven, so unfalsifiable doesn’t mean wrong.  At the end of the day all physics gets reduced to “just because, ok?”.

It’s fine if you BELIEVE that there is no sort of afterlife but we don’t know what consciousness or experience even is, we don’t know what anything is really, and we have stand-in words like “matter” which end up being tautological.  

In my eyes there may or may not be some kind of persistence of consciousness after death.  After all, people who are dead now were conscious, and people now are still conscious, so that’s persistence of consciousness if you consider homo sapiens as a unit.

Really these questions aren’t any different than the ones you will have to face when determining the metaphysical qualities of uploading.  Who are “you”, can that be duplicated, what is the actual internal experience of Brain A being uploaded to Upload X, etc.  If you can’t discuss metaphysics then it is ridiculous to discuss uploading.  

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[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 8:08 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Is there a real reason you feel it is irrational?

Yes.

Title: Genetic Selection for War in Prehistoric Human Populations

Authors: H. Keith Henson, Arel Lucas

Abstract: Behavior, including human behavior related to war, is no
less subject to Darwinian selection than physical traits. Behavior
results from physical brain modules constructed by genes and
environmental input. The environmental detection and operation of
behavioral switches leading to wars are also under evolutionary
selection. War behavior in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness
(EEA) was under positive selection when the alternative (starvation)
was worse for genes than war. The model is then applied in an attempt
to explain the behavioral difference between chimpanzees and bonobos
with additional thoughts on the KhoeSan People of Southern Africa.

snip

Religious organizations have often been associated with warlike
rhetoric, such as two of the three circulating mental contents
mentioned by Robert Wright in his Moral Animal: “The mental machinery
that drives modern wars—patriotic fervor, mass self-righteousness,
contagious rage—has often been traced by evolutionists to eons of
conflicts among tribes or bands.” (Wright 1994) It has been
suggested that the ability of humans to have religions at all may be
due to the selection of psychological traits for war. (MacNeill 2004)
In this view, humans have been selected to have irrational thoughts
as well as rational ones. Selection for rational thinking is easy to
understand. Selection for irrational thinking is more complicated. It
is carried along as one of the psychological traits that lead to wars.

snip

Simple as this model is, humans seem to have a (possibly evolved) bias
against the understanding that they have or are influenced by evolved
internal psychological mechanisms. In other words, too much insight
may not be good for your genes.

(end, i.e., I don't expect you to grok this.)

>Perhaps unfalsifiable but you would be surprised at the amount of unfalsifiable things people think on a daily basis. It is of course also a hallmark of logic that there are always true statements that cannot be proven, so unfalsifiable doesn’t mean wrong. At the end of the day all physics gets reduced to “just because, ok?”.
>
> It’s fine if you BELIEVE that there is no sort of afterlife but we don’t know what consciousness or experience even is, we don’t know what anything is really, and we have stand-in words like “matter” which end up being tautological.
>
> In my eyes there may or may not be some kind of persistence of consciousness after death. After all, people who are dead now were conscious, and people now are still conscious, so that’s persistence of consciousness if you consider homo sapiens as a unit.
>
> Really these questions aren’t any different than the ones you will have to face when determining the metaphysical qualities of uploading. Who are “you”, can that be duplicated, what is the actual internal experience of Brain A being uploaded to Upload X, etc. If you can’t discuss metaphysics then it is ridiculous to discuss uploading.

I am an engineer and a hardcore materialist. I don't relate at all to
the above. However, I expect uploading to occur by the mid-2040s,
wrote fiction "The Clinic Seed" about how most of the human race went
biologically extinct because they uploaded.

https://terasemjournals.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/henson-chapters-1-2-3-with-bio-no-illustrations.pdf

7000 words. Don't expect you to read it.

When the AIs first came out, I had several pages of conversation with
one of them about the AI in the story. It was surreal to be
discussing a fictional AI from 18 years ago with a real one.

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 11:08 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> In Is there a real reason you feel it is irrational? [...] In my eyes there may or may not be some kind of persistence of consciousness after death.

A china teapot may or may not be in orbit around the planet Uranus, there are only two possibilities: it's there or it's not, there is no evidence for or against the idea. However it would be irrational to therefore conclude there is a 50% chance it's there; it would even be irrational to take the idea seriously, by that I mean to significantly change your lifestyle based on the possibility of that tea pot existing. I would put life after information theoretical death in the same category as that teapot. 

As for cryonics, to my knowledge nobody has presented any evidence that it couldn't theoretically work, but people have presented evidence that it could theoretically work.  Of course there is a huge gap between "could theoretically work" and "will work" but ......well....  If I was in a hurricane on a sinking ship thousands of miles from land, and no rescue messages had been sent, and the waves were mountainous and the lifeboat was very small, I'd still get in the boat. But apparently you would not.

And after all, if cryonics doesn't work it won't make me be any deader than somebody like you who doesn't use cryonics.  The only thing it cost me is some money and I can afford it. 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

uxq

[Will Steinberg]

1. Keith, your hypothesis is retardedly simple to grok, it’s not particularly novel, and I have had plenty of time to grok it because you trot it out in response to everything, even when spurious.  And it still is not a reason for you to find metaphysics distasteful besides the fact that you are an obstinate autist who wants to believe uploading will magically happen without doing any metaphysical heavy lifting.

2. John has what’s closer to an actually reasonable agreement, but Russell’s teapot is a spook and glosses over the fact that not all unfalsifiable claims are equally unlikely.  Surely if I told you there was a teapot-sized rock in the same place with the same qualities you would find that easy to believe, even though you can’t prove it just the same.  The ideas of afterlives and greater consciousnesses are so easy to believe because they are natural extensions of the only real clear evidence any of us have, which is that it is like something to be each of ourselves.  

Anyway I commend John for at least choosing to open his eyes against the problem even if his answer is a teapotty “just because, ok?  we haven’t figured it out yet so there is clearly* no answer”

*according to John

As for Keith, it’s ok, I don’t expect you to grok it :)

[John Clark]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2025 at 9:19 AM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Keith, your hypothesis is retardedly simple to grok, it’s not particularly novel, and I have had plenty of time to grok it because you trot it out in response to everything, even when spurious.  And it still is not a reason for you to find metaphysics distasteful besides the fact that you are an obstinate autist

A little obstinate perhaps, but no more so than me or you, and I have seen no evidence that Keith is autistic.    

 

> who wants to believe uploading will magically happen without doing any metaphysical heavy lifting.

I am quite sure Keith doesn't believe uploading will magically happen, he believes it will scientifically happen. And philosophers have been "metaphysicaly heavy lifting" for millennia and in all that time they have never accomplished a damn thing because they were asking the wrong question, "what causes consciousness?" when they should've been asking "what causes intelligence?"  

>  if I told you there was a teapot-sized rock in the same place with the same qualities you would find that easy to believe,

Obviously! If a rock had all the same qualities as a teapot then the "rock" would be a teapot.  

John K Clark

[Will Steinberg]

Right but what I’m saying is, why would you be more likely to believe in the unfalsifiable existence of a particular rock in orbit than of a teapot?  Well because it makes sense that a rock would be out there.  The epistemics line up, and I don’t believe it’s absurd at all to think, given the interior knowledge you have on consciousness, that it may be somehow persistent in some way, or that there may be some greater manifestation of it.  It’s a far more general and easier to swallow assertion than that of the teapot.

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[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2025 at 6:19 AM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 1. Keith, your hypothesis is retardedly simple to grok,

It's a model rather than a hypothesis. It is rooted in evolution and
accounts for and predicts an awful lot of human social behavior, for
example, the rise of memes like those behind Naizism in Germany or
MAGA in the US. It allows understanding at a high level of what is
going on and how to improve the human condition. It accounts for why
the IRA went out of business and why Gaza is such a mess.
Unfortunately, so far it has not led to practical policy changes.

> it’s not particularly novel, and I have had plenty of time to grok it because you trot it out in response to everything, even when spurious.

I see no evidence that you have incorporated this model into your
understanding of the world around you. I can't fault you because as
far as I know, nobody has used this model to suggest ways to improve
the human condition. If you did understand it and applied it, it
would be a great service to humanity that has completely eluded me. I
understand what is going on, and how things might be improved, but
improving things has been intractable except for raw engineering
efforts.

> And it still is not a reason for you to find metaphysics distasteful besides the fact that you are an obstinate autist who wants to believe uploading will magically happen without doing any metaphysical heavy lifting.

I simply don't relate to metaphysics (whatever it is) and I don't play
the violin either. Fault me if you wish, I am not going to concern
myself with imaginary teapots in space.

> 2. John has what’s closer to an actually reasonable agreement, but Russell’s teapot is a spook and glosses over the fact that not all unfalsifiable claims are equally unlikely. Surely if I told you there was a teapot-sized rock in the same place with the same qualities you would find that easy to believe, even though you can’t prove it just the same.

They are equally silly and have no practical application whatsoever.

> The ideas of afterlives and greater consciousnesses are so easy to believe because they are natural extensions of the only real clear evidence any of us have, which is that it is like something to be each of ourselves.

"Afterlives" makes no sense to me, though I can see where irrational
memes about it would spread. I have no reference for "greater
consciousness" and have no idea of what you might be talking about.

> Anyway I commend John for at least choosing to open his eyes against the problem even if his answer is a teapotty “just because, ok? we haven’t figured it out yet so there is clearly* no answer”

If you want to believe in afterlives or teapots flying around in
space, go right ahead, but don't expect me to share your irrational
memes.

Keith

> *according to John
>
> As for Keith, it’s ok, I don’t expect you to grok it :)
>

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[Will Steinberg]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2025 at 11:42 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Apr 21, 2025 at 6:19 AM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 1. Keith, your hypothesis is retardedly simple to grok,

It's a model rather than a hypothesis.  It is rooted in evolution and
accounts for and predicts an awful lot of human social behavior, for
example, the rise of memes like those behind Naizism in Germany or
MAGA in the US.  It allows understanding at a high level of what is
going on and how to improve the human condition.  It accounts for why
the IRA went out of business and why Gaza is such a mess.
Unfortunately, so far it has not led to practical policy changes.

> it’s not particularly novel, and I have had plenty of time to grok it because you trot it out in response to everything, even when spurious.

I see no evidence that you have incorporated this model into your
understanding of the world around you.  I can't fault you because as
far as I know, nobody has used this model to suggest ways to improve
the human condition.  If you did understand it and applied it, it
would be a great service to humanity that has completely eluded me.  I
understand what is going on, and how things might be improved, but
improving things has been intractable except for raw engineering
efforts.

You BELIEVE you understand what's going on.  It's important to be clear with these things.  I believe your *model* is a gross oversimplification of why people do the things they do.  My theory is that due to the strife around us, you have gravitated to simplified ideas about how the world works because it gives you some solace in a chaotic world. ;)

Really now, it's not a bad idea, but the weight you are placing on it is massive.  Here's a fact: it, whatever it is, is almost never one thing, or mostly one thing.  And one of the constants of science is that "one thing" things are consistently overturned and shown to rather be many things.  So your preoccupation with this model is strange, and it honestly makes it less convincing given that you trot it out at every given opportunity.  It reminds me of Brent shilling Canonizer lol (no hate Brent it's just a lot.)

 

> And it still is not a reason for you to find metaphysics distasteful besides the fact that you are an obstinate autist who wants to believe uploading will magically happen without doing any metaphysical heavy lifting.

I simply don't relate to metaphysics (whatever it is) and I don't play
the violin either.  Fault me if you wish, I am not going to concern
myself with imaginary teapots in space.

What even does it mean to "[not] relate to metaphysics"?  Are you a philosophical zombie?  You are a being, you BE.  You experience qualia.  You can't escape 'relating' to metaphysics, it's your whole existence.

 

> 2. John has what’s closer to an actually reasonable agreement, but Russell’s teapot is a spook and glosses over the fact that not all unfalsifiable claims are equally unlikely.  Surely if I told you there was a teapot-sized rock in the same place with the same qualities you would find that easy to believe, even though you can’t prove it just the same.

They are equally silly and have no practical application whatsoever.

At least you're consistent.  But I think the rock is more likely.  Or what if I told you a British space station with a tea set in it blew up around that orbital distance, would you be more likely to believe it?  What if you had testimony from someone that they saw the teapot up there, while in space?  Do you need pictures?  Science functioned for a long time without pictures or video.

The point I am trying to make--besides the incompleteness theorems already showing that true but unprovable statements exists in all formal system--is that there are degrees of believability to unfalsifiable statements.  For example, you make the statement that YOU are conscious.  This is unfalsifiable to me.  But I believe it because you have a brain, and I have a brain, and experiments have shown that the brain is where our consciousness is located, so I believe it--with evidence, but not enough evidence to PROVE it.

Similarly I believe that, from a materialist viewpoint, nothing is particularly special about the brain to cause consciousness, it's not magic, just data.  And there is data everywhere.  Why would agglomerations of humans not be jointly conscious?  Especially given the split-brain experiments showing that we can be decomposed to nearly independent units.  Give 3 humans each 1/3 of a password, none of them know it totally.  But put them in a black box and ask the box to give you the password, and it works.  The group *knows* it--jointly.

 

> The ideas of afterlives and greater consciousnesses are so easy to believe because they are natural extensions of the only real clear evidence any of us have, which is that it is like something to be each of ourselves.

"Afterlives" makes no sense to me, though I can see where irrational
memes about it would spread. I have no reference for "greater
consciousness" and have no idea of what you might be talking about.

Well it's a simple enough explanation to say that it is literally impossible to imagine permanent cessation of consciousness.  Though people do get amnesia and become completely other people, so I don't know.  I'm not sure what I believe, but given that the brain is just atoms, and they're conscious, I don't believe consciousness IN GENERAL, in the universe, will ever permanently disappear, as it is clearly part of physics, in the sense that it happens around data.  

 

> Anyway I commend John for at least choosing to open his eyes against the problem even if his answer is a teapotty “just because, ok?  we haven’t figured it out yet so there is clearly* no answer”

If you want to believe in afterlives or teapots flying around in
space, go right ahead, but don't expect me to share your irrational
memes.

I feel you've avoided the topic. 

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2025 at 9:43 AM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

snip

> You BELIEVE you understand what's going on It's important to be clear with these things. I believe your *model* is a gross oversimplification of why people do the things they do. My theory is that due to the strife around us, you have gravitated to simplified ideas about how the world works because it gives you some solace in a chaotic world. ;)

If you have a more complicated model that explains the world around
us, please do. As for solace, nope.

> Really now, it's not a bad idea, but the weight you are placing on it is massive. Here's a fact: it, whatever it is, is almost never one thing, or mostly one thing. And one of the constants of science is that "one thing" things are consistently overturned and shown to rather be many things. So your preoccupation with this model is strange, and it honestly makes it less convincing given that you trot it out at every given opportunity. It reminds me of Brent shilling Canonizer lol (no hate Brent it's just a lot.)
>

If you don't like the model, you can ignore it. I did for the
Canonizer postings for years.

>>
>> > And it still is not a reason for you to find metaphysics distasteful besides the fact that you are an obstinate autist

Sorry, autistic wasn't a thing for my age bracket. You can try
another insult if you wish.

> who wants to believe uploading will magically happen without doing any metaphysical heavy lifting.
>>
>> I simply don't relate to metaphysics (whatever it is) and I don't play
>> the violin either. Fault me if you wish, I am not going to concern
>> myself with imaginary teapots in space.
>
> What even does it mean to "[not] relate to metaphysics"? Are you a philosophical zombie? You are a being, you BE. You experience qualia.

The qualia arguments go right over my head. You could note that I
have never responded to them.

> You can't escape 'relating' to metaphysics, it's your whole existence.
>

Could be, but I don't understand it at all. From other comments,
people have been going on about it for maybe 3000 years.

>>
>> > 2. John has what’s closer to an actually reasonable agreement, but Russell’s teapot is a spook and glosses over the fact that not all unfalsifiable claims are equally unlikely. Surely if I told you there was a teapot-sized rock in the same place with the same qualities you would find that easy to believe, even though you can’t prove it just the same.
>>
>> They are equally silly and have no practical application whatsoever.
>
> At least you're consistent. But I think the rock is more likely. Or what if I told you a British space station with a tea set in it blew up around that orbital distance, would you be more likely to believe it?

No

> What if you had testimony from someone that they saw the teapot up there, while in space?

No.

> Do you need pictures?

In this era does a picture mean anything?

> Science functioned for a long time without pictures or video.
>
> The point I am trying to make--besides the incompleteness theorems already showing that true but unprovable statements exists in all formal system--is that there are degrees of believability to unfalsifiable statements. For example, you make the statement that YOU are conscious.

Really? That does not sound like something I would do, but you might
be able to find a place where I slipped up.

> This is unfalsifiable to me.

I know, which makes it a valueless thing to say.

> But I believe it because you have a brain, and I have a brain, and experiments have shown that the brain is where our consciousness is located, so I believe it--with evidence, but not enough evidence to PROVE it.
>
> Similarly I believe that, from a materialist viewpoint, nothing is particularly special about the brain to cause consciousness, it's not magic, just data. And there is data everywhere. Why would agglomerations of humans not be jointly conscious?

I can't imagine how "jointly conscious" would come about.

>Especially given the split-brain experiments showing that we can be decomposed to nearly independent units. Give 3 humans each 1/3 of a password, none of them know it totally. But put them in a black box and ask the box to give you the password, and it works. The group *knows* it--jointly.

I have cited Gazaniga's work many times over decades. I consider this
a gross misuse of his work.

>> > The ideas of afterlives and greater consciousnesses are so easy to believe because they are natural extensions of the only real clear evidence any of us have, which is that it is like something to be each of ourselves.
>>
>> "Afterlives" makes no sense to me, though I can see where irrational
>> memes about it would spread. I have no reference for "greater
>> consciousness" and have no idea of what you might be talking about.
>
> Well it's a simple enough explanation to say that it is literally impossible to imagine permanent cessation of consciousness.

I find it no problem to imagine it at all. To whatever extent
dinosaurs had consciousness that permanently ceased one morning 66
million years ago.

> Though people do get amnesia and become completely other people, so I don't know. I'm not sure what I believe, but given that the brain is just atoms, and they're conscious, I don't believe consciousness IN GENERAL, in the universe, will ever permanently disappear, as it is clearly part of physics, in the sense that it happens around data.

To me, this is just nonsense.

>> > Anyway I commend John for at least choosing to open his eyes against the problem even if his answer is a teapotty “just because, ok? we haven’t figured it out yet so there is clearly* no answer”
>>
>> If you want to believe in afterlives or teapots flying around in
>> space, go right ahead, but don't expect me to share your irrational
>> memes.
>
> I feel you've avoided the topic.

How can I avoid the topic when it makes no sense?

Keith

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