Scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil presents a different take at immortality, a more physical one. Like you, Kurzweil views the soul as "software" that can be executed on different "hardware". He further believes that in a relatively short while, we will have electronic hardware which is the equivalent of the human brain (which you eloquently characterize as a "universal machine", capable as "executing" any "soul software"). Once such hardware is available, Kurzweil believes immortality would have been reached: by "downloading" our soul-software onto electronic brains ("Giant Electronic Brains"?), we will become immortals, able to create backups of our souls to be restored in case of disaster, and able to shift our physical location anywhere in the speed of a software download.
Do you share Kurzweil's view of hardware being able to execute human soul software within the foreseeable future? Do you agree with his view of this being the equivalent of immortality â" will the software running on the electronic brain be the same "I"?
I think Ray Kurzweil is terrified by his own mortality and deeply longs to avoid death. I understand this obsession of his and am even somehow touched by its ferocious intensity, but I think it badly distorts his vision. As I see it, Kurzweil's desperate hopes seriously cloud his scientific objectivity.
I think Kurzweil sees technology as progressing so deterministically fast (Moore's Law, etc.) that inevitably, within a few decades, hardware will be so fast and nanotechnology so advanced that things unbelievable to us now will be easily doable. A key element in this whole vision is that no one will need to understand the mind or brain in order to copy a particular human's mind with perfect accuracy, because trillions of tiny "nanobots" will swarm through the bloodstream in the human brain and will report back all the "wiring details" of that particular brain, which at that point constitute a very complex table of data that can be fed into a universal computer program that executes neuron-firings, and presto - that individual's mind has been reinstantiated in an electronic medium. (This vision is quite reminiscent of the scenario painted in my piece "A Conversation with Einstein's Brain" toward the end of The Mind's I, actually, with the only difference being that there is no computer processing anything - it's all done in the pages of a huge book, with a human being playing the role of the processor.)
Rather ironically, this vision totally bypasses the need for cognitive science or AI, because all one needs is the detailed wiring plan of a brain and then it's a piece of cake to copy the brain in other media. And thus, says Kurzweil, we will have achieved immortal souls that live on (and potentially forever) in superfast computational hardware - and Kurzweil sees this happening so soon that he is banking on his own brain being thus "uploaded" into superfast hardware and hence he expects (or at least he loudly proclaims that he expects) to become literally immortal - and not in the way Chopin is quasi-immortal, with just little shards of his soul remaining, but with his whole soul preserved forever.
Well, the problem is that a soul by itself would go crazy; it has to live in a vastly complex world, and it has to cohabit that world with many other souls, commingling with them just as we do here on earth. To be sure, Kurzweil sees those things as no problem, either - we'll have virtual worlds galore, "up there" in Cyberheaven, and of course there will be souls by the barrelful all running on the same hardware. And Kurzweil sees the new software souls as intermingling in all sorts of unanticipated and unimaginable ways.
Well, to me, this "glorious" new world would be the end of humanity as we know it. If such a vision co
That's just not true. UAC pops up warnings on my machine at home when I install stuff or change the date and time. All those things are rare though, most of the time I never see a UAC pop up. If I did I'd start hunting for malware.
Of course the big win of Vista over XP is that most processes are no longer running with admin privileges, and that means they have no access to the sensitive parts of the registry or filesystem. Actually I remember back in the XP days one of the complaints about Windows was that unlike Linux or MacOS everyone run as admin all the time.
> What does that mean? Only natural born Americans have the right to criticise other natural born Americans?
no it means that if you dont live here you probably don't understand the full context of the history of the group that came up with the term and the implications carried with it because of it. don't be so touchy
Ha, that's what you think. I read their books. I don't agree with much of their foreign policy ideas anymore, but I certainly know and agree with their arguments for using that term.
I would strongly caution against foreigners using that term as they lack a lot of context to understand what they're really saying when they use it.
What does that mean? Only natural born Americans have the right to criticise other natural born Americans?
but yes everyone country certainly has people who think it's worse than hammered shit fried in devils tears.
Actually every sufficiently free country has these people, or at least in every sufficiently free country they seem to rant on the internets.
By this I mean countries like America and the UK have a sufficient degree of free speech that these people can post on the internet without fear of getting locked up, unlike in China or Iran. Note I didn't say free countries, as no countries are truly free. I think Gitmo/rendition and so on sucks of course, but that doesn't alter the fact that in the US or the UK most people are free enough to spend their time ranting that they live in the worst country in the world.
I think there's a real danger here, reminiscent of the way that Nasa used to have a worse reputation for safety compared to far more secretive organisations solely because it was more open. It's not in anyone's interest to penalise freedom and openness in this way.
I think you have to be careful here. Science can explain things, i.e. tell us how things are. What it can't do is explain how things should be, i.e. what is morally right. There's a danger that evolutionary biology, which is a perfectly respectable science can be 'popularised' as some sort of social darwinist ideology that is actually about imposing a highly flawed moral code by linking that code to science. Most 20th century tyrannies claimed that their nutty policies were somehow scientific at one point or another. Since they were totalitarian they could sack or lock up scientists who disagreed with them and promote shysters who'd tell them what they wanted to hear.
Even free societies are not immune to this. Now 'science' is used to stop people arguing about cutting CO2 by ridiculously drastic amounts. It's not the science that is wrong, it's people cherry picking studies that support their ideological prejudices and then claiming that anyone who disagrees with those prejudices is 'anti science'.
Science is something which most people simultaneously respect and don't really understand. That means that it can be abused in all sorts of ways by the unprincipled.
That certain part of the population I talked about before loves America like a child loves a parent. Their lashing out is the source of the label "The Blame America First Crowd" because the other group, the mature one that recognizes and tries to correct flaws, was making an honest attempt at understanding what happened to try to prevent it from happening again.
I would also advise you take a look at your reaction and evaluate it in the light of this assessment.
I'm English, not American and I've had surreal conversations with Americans who have never left their country and who claim that their country is worse than China for human rights for example. Or is solely responsible for all of the worlds problems, particularly those in the Middle East. In a sense it's a sort of inverted nationalism. Nationalists think their country is always right. Most people can see that this is not the case and start to question their countries actions which is healthy. A small but irritatingly vocal minority end up believing their country is always wrong. Blame America First is not an unfair label for these people.
The problem for people like you is that these happened in areas that the Communists controlled, and directly because of government policies. If there had been no government at all and peasants had lived as they had before (i.e. in a capitalist system) they would most likely have been able to feed themselves. It was an attempt to turn people in serf labouring on collective farms that caused starvation on a massive scale.
Starving people in the third world hardly live under capitalism - the Ethiopian famine occured in rebel areas of a country controlled by a Marxist government.
If you just let people organise themselves, farmers will grow stuff and sell it to make money. Efficient businesses will take over inefficient ones. Quite quickly you'll have a problem of too much productive capacity (the EU pays people to not produce to keep prices high), rather than famine.
Capitalism works. Communism leads to slavery and mass starvation.
Communism killed tens of millions of people. I'd say that was worth fighting against, and worth helping allies against. Even South Vietnam.
Actually I'm typing this from Taiwan now. Back when Taiwan got military aid it was just a nasty a dictatorship as South Vietnam was. So was South Korea. Now both Taiwan and South Korea are democracies whereas China and North Korea have both lost tens of millions (up to 80 million in the PRC) to hunger and to political repression that still continues to this day. If the South Vietnam had survived there is no reason at all that it would not currently be as rich and as free as South Korea or Taiwan.
And if you were living under Communism, you'd have died in a concentration camp for whining about the government the way you obviously enjoy doing.
Alpha Centauri 4.36 ly 268 days 0.999128 4.56 years
Sirius 8.64 ly 314 days 0.999769 8.84 years
Polaris 783 ly 1.71 years 0.999999997 783.4 years
Is it me or is 8.84 years not a bad deal for a trip to Sirius?
I suspect if you had the technology to make the antimatter, some sort of suspended animation would be well within your capabilities too given current advances in molecular biology. And given time you could colonise the galaxy slowly but surely in series of short (<20ly) hops from star to star.
Which raised the (very legitimate) question of why we were even in the conflict to begin with.
Exactly. For that matter why establish Nato or help Western Europe. Nuclear war is very bad and one might start if the Russians got pissed off. Best keep them sweet and not get in the way of their expansionism. Hell, when it comes down to it, why not let the Cubans take over Florida. After all if you stop them there's a risk of nuclear war. And people in Florida would much rather live in peace under communism than die in a war. Hell, why bother defending any of the states. Once the commies take over there will be peace. After all, absolutely no one died in Russia or China or Cambodia after the Communist victory when they decided to get rid of their enemies.
It depends who is more important really, doesn't it? Microsoft goes through the pain because supporting binaries is something they have to do in a new OS otherwise people won't upgrade to it. Actually the whole OS is architected so that most 32 bit stuff just thunks through to 64 bit code so the amount of duplication is probably quite small.
The Linux world makes acid comments about closed binaries and does not. Users don't pay for uprades, so it doesn't matter how inconvenient the upgrade to 64 bit is. Of course that means they end up blaming Adobe for not porting to 64 bit whereas the Windows world doesn't much care, but then again flash is an evil closed binary too so Adobe deserve it.
What's funny about this is that even now they've done it people are complaining that flash is still a closed binary, they haven't released a debug version and don't support Sparc64 or Itanium and what they really should do is to release the source code.
Yes it is. It reminds me of a great put down on some forum. "Since you were born after Star Wars I have no interest in your opinion on this matter, or of anything else"
You don't need to emulate x86 on x64, the processor has native support for the instructions. At least on Windows the kernel is 64 bit and the WOW layer just needs to sign extend pointers. You probably need 32 and 64 bit copies of some of the DLLs though.
Of course it's a question of priorities. 64 bit Windows would die if it couldn't run 32 bit binaries.
With a bit of luck the stock market crash will wipe out his trustfund and he'll have to get a haircut and a real job. His blog would then be a source of great spiritual comfort to me.
What happens if an F22 is shot down and crashes over enemy territory and the code is GPL. The bad guys get hold of the binary, can they demand the source code?
Thought experiment: make it so that the thing won't be finished on Friday unless the pragmatist kills someone. You will discover a closeted (horror!) *idealist.
Naah, you're just not paying enough. Killing folks makes the hourly rate go way up. If you paid me enough to retire I'd kill as many people as needed. Hell I'd probably cap a couple of grannies on the way to Mexico too.
Slashdot Mirror
I will kill this Mossberg for you for ten million of your American dollars and a lifetime license for Windows XP.
raptureofthenerds, a phrase I learned from this wonderful interview with Douglas Hofstadter
http://tal.forum2.org/hofstadter_interview
Scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil presents a different take at immortality, a more physical one. Like you, Kurzweil views the soul as "software" that can be executed on different "hardware". He further believes that in a relatively short while, we will have electronic hardware which is the equivalent of the human brain (which you eloquently characterize as a "universal machine", capable as "executing" any "soul software"). Once such hardware is available, Kurzweil believes immortality would have been reached: by "downloading" our soul-software onto electronic brains ("Giant Electronic Brains"?), we will become immortals, able to create backups of our souls to be restored in case of disaster, and able to shift our physical location anywhere in the speed of a software download.
Do you share Kurzweil's view of hardware being able to execute human soul software within the foreseeable future? Do you agree with his view of this being the equivalent of immortality â" will the software running on the electronic brain be the same "I"?
I think Ray Kurzweil is terrified by his own mortality and deeply longs to avoid death. I understand this obsession of his and am even somehow touched by its ferocious intensity, but I think it badly distorts his vision. As I see it, Kurzweil's desperate hopes seriously cloud his scientific objectivity.
I think Kurzweil sees technology as progressing so deterministically fast (Moore's Law, etc.) that inevitably, within a few decades, hardware will be so fast and nanotechnology so advanced that things unbelievable to us now will be easily doable. A key element in this whole vision is that no one will need to understand the mind or brain in order to copy a particular human's mind with perfect accuracy, because trillions of tiny "nanobots" will swarm through the bloodstream in the human brain and will report back all the "wiring details" of that particular brain, which at that point constitute a very complex table of data that can be fed into a universal computer program that executes neuron-firings, and presto - that individual's mind has been reinstantiated in an electronic medium. (This vision is quite reminiscent of the scenario painted in my piece "A Conversation with Einstein's Brain" toward the end of The Mind's I, actually, with the only difference being that there is no computer processing anything - it's all done in the pages of a huge book, with a human being playing the role of the processor.)
Rather ironically, this vision totally bypasses the need for cognitive science or AI, because all one needs is the detailed wiring plan of a brain and then it's a piece of cake to copy the brain in other media. And thus, says Kurzweil, we will have achieved immortal souls that live on (and potentially forever) in superfast computational hardware - and Kurzweil sees this happening so soon that he is banking on his own brain being thus "uploaded" into superfast hardware and hence he expects (or at least he loudly proclaims that he expects) to become literally immortal - and not in the way Chopin is quasi-immortal, with just little shards of his soul remaining, but with his whole soul preserved forever.
Well, the problem is that a soul by itself would go crazy; it has to live in a vastly complex world, and it has to cohabit that world with many other souls, commingling with them just as we do here on earth. To be sure, Kurzweil sees those things as no problem, either - we'll have virtual worlds galore, "up there" in Cyberheaven, and of course there will be souls by the barrelful all running on the same hardware. And Kurzweil sees the new software souls as intermingling in all sorts of unanticipated and unimaginable ways.
Well, to me, this "glorious" new world would be the end of humanity as we know it. If such a vision co
That's just not true. UAC pops up warnings on my machine at home when I install stuff or change the date and time. All those things are rare though, most of the time I never see a UAC pop up. If I did I'd start hunting for malware.
Of course the big win of Vista over XP is that most processes are no longer running with admin privileges, and that means they have no access to the sensitive parts of the registry or filesystem. Actually I remember back in the XP days one of the complaints about Windows was that unlike Linux or MacOS everyone run as admin all the time.
> What does that mean? Only natural born Americans have the right to criticise other natural born Americans?
no it means that if you dont live here you probably don't understand the full context of the history of the group that came up with the term and the implications carried with it because of it. don't be so touchy
Ha, that's what you think. I read their books. I don't agree with much of their foreign policy ideas anymore, but I certainly know and agree with their arguments for using that term.
I would strongly caution against foreigners using that term as they lack a lot of context to understand what they're really saying when they use it.
What does that mean? Only natural born Americans have the right to criticise other natural born Americans?
but yes everyone country certainly has people who think it's worse than hammered shit fried in devils tears.
Actually every sufficiently free country has these people, or at least in every sufficiently free country they seem to rant on the internets.
By this I mean countries like America and the UK have a sufficient degree of free speech that these people can post on the internet without fear of getting locked up, unlike in China or Iran. Note I didn't say free countries, as no countries are truly free. I think Gitmo/rendition and so on sucks of course, but that doesn't alter the fact that in the US or the UK most people are free enough to spend their time ranting that they live in the worst country in the world.
I think there's a real danger here, reminiscent of the way that Nasa used to have a worse reputation for safety compared to far more secretive organisations solely because it was more open. It's not in anyone's interest to penalise freedom and openness in this way.
I think you have to be careful here. Science can explain things, i.e. tell us how things are. What it can't do is explain how things should be, i.e. what is morally right. There's a danger that evolutionary biology, which is a perfectly respectable science can be 'popularised' as some sort of social darwinist ideology that is actually about imposing a highly flawed moral code by linking that code to science. Most 20th century tyrannies claimed that their nutty policies were somehow scientific at one point or another. Since they were totalitarian they could sack or lock up scientists who disagreed with them and promote shysters who'd tell them what they wanted to hear.
Even free societies are not immune to this. Now 'science' is used to stop people arguing about cutting CO2 by ridiculously drastic amounts. It's not the science that is wrong, it's people cherry picking studies that support their ideological prejudices and then claiming that anyone who disagrees with those prejudices is 'anti science'.
Science is something which most people simultaneously respect and don't really understand. That means that it can be abused in all sorts of ways by the unprincipled.
The outrage is that Health & Human Develoment majors typically don't receive comparable salaries to comp sci graduates
Of course, not. It's woman's work!
That certain part of the population I talked about before loves America like a child loves a parent. Their lashing out is the source of the label "The Blame America First Crowd" because the other group, the mature one that recognizes and tries to correct flaws, was making an honest attempt at understanding what happened to try to prevent it from happening again.
I would also advise you take a look at your reaction and evaluate it in the light of this assessment.
I'm English, not American and I've had surreal conversations with Americans who have never left their country and who claim that their country is worse than China for human rights for example. Or is solely responsible for all of the worlds problems, particularly those in the Middle East. In a sense it's a sort of inverted nationalism. Nationalists think their country is always right. Most people can see that this is not the case and start to question their countries actions which is healthy. A small but irritatingly vocal minority end up believing their country is always wrong. Blame America First is not an unfair label for these people.
The guy who modded you interesing must be one of those idiots.
Well I was going for funny, but maybe he was trying to help my karma or something.
And Higgs is known as the God particle. Maybe God is stopping the construction of this modern Tower of Babel.
The vast numbers of deaths due to Communism are well documented
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Consequences
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor#Death_toll
The problem for people like you is that these happened in areas that the Communists controlled, and directly because of government policies. If there had been no government at all and peasants had lived as they had before (i.e. in a capitalist system) they would most likely have been able to feed themselves. It was an attempt to turn people in serf labouring on collective farms that caused starvation on a massive scale.
Starving people in the third world hardly live under capitalism - the Ethiopian famine occured in rebel areas of a country controlled by a Marxist government.
If you just let people organise themselves, farmers will grow stuff and sell it to make money. Efficient businesses will take over inefficient ones. Quite quickly you'll have a problem of too much productive capacity (the EU pays people to not produce to keep prices high), rather than famine.
Capitalism works. Communism leads to slavery and mass starvation.
Get off my lawn!
Or should I say my Jabba the Hut lawn ornament.
Communism killed tens of millions of people. I'd say that was worth fighting against, and worth helping allies against. Even South Vietnam.
Actually I'm typing this from Taiwan now. Back when Taiwan got military aid it was just a nasty a dictatorship as South Vietnam was. So was South Korea. Now both Taiwan and South Korea are democracies whereas China and North Korea have both lost tens of millions (up to 80 million in the PRC) to hunger and to political repression that still continues to this day. If the South Vietnam had survived there is no reason at all that it would not currently be as rich and as free as South Korea or Taiwan.
And if you were living under Communism, you'd have died in a concentration camp for whining about the government the way you obviously enjoy doing.
That page on c ships is fascinating
Alpha Centauri 4.36 ly 268 days 0.999128 4.56 years
Sirius 8.64 ly 314 days 0.999769 8.84 years
Polaris 783 ly 1.71 years 0.999999997 783.4 years
Is it me or is 8.84 years not a bad deal for a trip to Sirius?
I suspect if you had the technology to make the antimatter, some sort of suspended animation would be well within your capabilities too given current advances in molecular biology. And given time you could colonise the galaxy slowly but surely in series of short (<20ly) hops from star to star.
Which raised the (very legitimate) question of why we were even in the conflict to begin with.
Exactly. For that matter why establish Nato or help Western Europe. Nuclear war is very bad and one might start if the Russians got pissed off. Best keep them sweet and not get in the way of their expansionism. Hell, when it comes down to it, why not let the Cubans take over Florida. After all if you stop them there's a risk of nuclear war. And people in Florida would much rather live in peace under communism than die in a war. Hell, why bother defending any of the states. Once the commies take over there will be peace. After all, absolutely no one died in Russia or China or Cambodia after the Communist victory when they decided to get rid of their enemies.
A thimbleful of antimatter would make any H-bomb look like a popgun.
A popgun. You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The latest firmware can boot XP
http://www.olpcnews.com/sales_talk/microsoft/how_to_run_windows_xo.html
A seahorse shits things more clever than that.
Wow, comedy GOLD!
It depends who is more important really, doesn't it? Microsoft goes through the pain because supporting binaries is something they have to do in a new OS otherwise people won't upgrade to it. Actually the whole OS is architected so that most 32 bit stuff just thunks through to 64 bit code so the amount of duplication is probably quite small.
The Linux world makes acid comments about closed binaries and does not. Users don't pay for uprades, so it doesn't matter how inconvenient the upgrade to 64 bit is. Of course that means they end up blaming Adobe for not porting to 64 bit whereas the Windows world doesn't much care, but then again flash is an evil closed binary too so Adobe deserve it.
Linux Hater ranted about this, in his inimitable style.
http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/07/my-browser-needs-16-exabytes.html
What's funny about this is that even now they've done it people are complaining that flash is still a closed binary, they haven't released a debug version and don't support Sparc64 or Itanium and what they really should do is to release the source code.
Yes it is. It reminds me of a great put down on some forum. "Since you were born after Star Wars I have no interest in your opinion on this matter, or of anything else"
You don't need to emulate x86 on x64, the processor has native support for the instructions. At least on Windows the kernel is 64 bit and the WOW layer just needs to sign extend pointers. You probably need 32 and 64 bit copies of some of the DLLs though.
Of course it's a question of priorities. 64 bit Windows would die if it couldn't run 32 bit binaries.
With a bit of luck the stock market crash will wipe out his trustfund and he'll have to get a haircut and a real job. His blog would then be a source of great spiritual comfort to me.
What happens if an F22 is shot down and crashes over enemy territory and the code is GPL. The bad guys get hold of the binary, can they demand the source code?
Thought experiment: make it so that the thing won't be finished on Friday unless the pragmatist kills someone. You will discover a closeted (horror!) *idealist.
Naah, you're just not paying enough. Killing folks makes the hourly rate go way up. If you paid me enough to retire I'd kill as many people as needed. Hell I'd probably cap a couple of grannies on the way to Mexico too.