Transumanar

Dove va la biopolitica?

Riprendo a scrivere articoli in Italiano dopo vari mesi, con la promessa di farlo più spesso. Stefano Vaj, Segretario dell’ Associazione Italiana Transumanisti, mi ha gentilmente inviato una copia del libretto - intervista Dove va la biopolitica?, a cura di Adriano Scianca: ”Dove va la biopolitica? Perché tecnoscienza, genetica, ecologia, bioetica sono sempre più al centro dello scontro ideologico? Qual è, quale può essere l’avvenire della nostra specie e del nostro ambiente? Siamo davvero di fronte ad una trasformazione postumana? Stefano Vaj esamina le questioni essenziali del nuovo secolo alla luce della ricerca scientifica e del dibattito filosofico più recenti, proponendo risposte originali e concrete che si riallacciano all’eredità del futurismo e del sovrumanismo europeo.”.

Il libretto, di appena 60 pagine di domande e risposte, si legge in un’ ora e costituisce un utile riassunto dell’ opera Biopolitica. Il nuovo paradigma, dello stesso autore, della quale ho scritto a suo tempo una breve recensione in inglese. Come (spero che) tutti sapranno il futurismo è stato un movimento artistico e culturale, chiaramente precursore di varie interpretazioni del transumanismo, del quale l’ esponente più conosciuto è stato Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, l’ autore del Manifesto del Futurismo della cui pubblicazione si avvicina il centenario. Che il movimento futurista sia stato a volte considerato, se non un alleato, almeno un precursore del fascismo, è un errore storico e filosofico. Bruce Sterling, che certo fascista non è, ha recentemente pubblicato su Wired il Manifesto del Futurismo in inglese, e ha parlato di futurismo (attraverso David Orban) in occasione di un recente convegno a Torino (versione in inglese - video in blip.tv - parte del video in Youtube).

Che cosa è il sovrumanismo? Secondo alcuni critici (vedasi anche la critica in inglese), si tratta di una pericolosa componente fascista, o neofascista, del pensiero transumanista, vicina allo spirito della Nouvelle Droite francese. Nelle parole di Vaj, invece: ”La versione “fondamentalista”, sovrumanista e postumanista, che io propongo rappresenta in ultima analisi lo sbocco obbligato di qualsiasi transumanismo coerente.”. E alla fine del libretto, riecheggiando il linguaggio “eroico” di Marinetti: : ”La nostra inquieta esplorazione del mondo, le tecniche che ne discendono, ci condannano a delle scelte, ci offrono dei poteri, ma non possono dirci cosa farne. Questo non appartiene agli ingegneri o agli scienziati o ai giuristi, ma ai poeti, agli “eroi fondatori” ed alle aristocrazie che sanno tradurre in atto l’ oscura volontà collettiva della comunità popolare da cui emanano.”.

Questo non mi sembra fascismo, almeno non come lo definisco io. Se questo è fascismo, allora sono fascista. Ma mi sembra più vicino al transumanismo eroicamente radicale, e radicalmente eroico, espresso ad esempio da Max More: ”Cara Madre Natura… abbiamo deciso che è giunto il momento di modificare la costituzione umana...” e William Sims Bainbridge: ”Abbiamo bisogno di un nuovo movimento sociale dedicato alla conquista dello spazio e capace di dare un senso di proposito trascendente ai settori dominanti della società… la condizione umana è estremamente assurda se non viene vista in un contesto cosmico capace di darle significato...”. Preferisco il sovrumanismo e il sovversivo eroismo marinettiano ad alcune interpretazioni moderne del transumanismo, troppo asettiche e politicamente corrette, troppo caute e socialmente responsabili e, infine, troppo annacquate e mortalmente noiose.

Second annual Thinkers Lecture, December 7, Second Life

From Extropia DaSilva:

Presenting the second annual Thinkers Lecture.

As the likes of Google improve in their ability to anticipate your needs and find meaningful patterns in the information humanity accumulates, what are they evolving into?

The Thinkers Lecture will be given in Second Life, at the Cosmic Engineers meeting place, on Sunday December 7. Most Cosmic Engineers Sunday meetings so far have been at 10am PST/SLT (1pm EST, 6pm UK, 7pm Continental EU), but there are suggestions to move the hour to noon SLT (two hours later). Please comment and say which hour works best for you.

My doggy’s 10th birthday party, WEBCAST

I need to do an end to end test of our video streaming server, and many people ask to see our sweet doggy Sacha (picture) who is 10 today. So, also in protest against human exceptionalism, I will webcast her birthday party tonight:

WEBCAST of Sacha’s 10th birthday party
Sunday November 16, 8:30 pm Madrid, 7:30pm London, 2:30 pm NYC
Open this URL in QuickTime player or VLC:

http://v98.metaxlr8.com/mystream.sdp

If you cannot see the stream in QT set QT preferences to Transport HTTP port 80.

The webcast will also be streamed in Second Life after the Cosmic Engineers meeting.

Please visit Sacha Fan Club on Facebook.

NOTE: about 20 persons watched the webcast. New pictures and video on Facebook.

Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap

Whole brain emulation (WBE) is the possible future one-to-one modelling of the function of the human brain. It represents a formidable engineering and research problem, yet one which appears to have a well-defined goal and could, it would seem, be achieved by extrapolations of current technology. Since the implications of successful WBE are potentially very large the Future of Humanity Institute hosted a workshop in Oxford on 26-27 May, 2007. Invited experts from areas such as computational neuroscience, brain-scanning technology, computing, and neurobiology presented their findings and discussed the possibilities, problems and milestones that would have to be reached before WBE becomes feasible. The result of the workshop is the following Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap.

Author Anders Sandberg will give a talk on Emulating brains: silicon dreams or the next big thing? at the next Extrobritannia meeting scheduled for Saturday November the 22nd 2008; 2:00pm - 4:00pm. There are plans to webcast the event in a video streaming format also compatible with Second Life, watch for news.

Cosmic Engineers meeting in Second Life and IRC

We have successfully tested the new IRC channel and the Second Life relay, and today’s Cosmic Engineers meeting in Second Life will be the first with a Second Life - IRC gateway. The meeting is at 10am PST/SLT (1pm EST, 6pm UK, 7pm Continental EU unless todat’s time change is not uniform, please check).

The Cosmic Engineers IRC channel is on freenode.

Server: irc.freenode.net

Alternative servers: chat.eu.freenode.net - chat.us.freenode.net - Complete list

To enter the channel type /join #cosmeng in IRC or use the appropriate command in your IRC client to join #cosmeng.

Channel policy: it is very simple - anything relevant goes, except of course spam and unnecessary rudeness.

We will be using the IRC channel for internal discussion and also for outreach. Everyone can come and ask questions about transhumanism, Cosmic Engineers, etc.

The IRC channel is linked to the chat area in Second Life by a Second Life - IRC gateway developed by David aka Lucifer.

This is a very useful tool, especially for those who want to participate in meeting without running Second Life. Now that IRC clients are integrated in popular browsers (Opera and Seamonkey are the first, but I am sure all other major browers will follow), I nostalgically remember the 80s and expect a renewed popularity of IRC, a great lightweight internet chat system that can be used on any device including modern mobile phones.

Transhumanism Rising

In a very interesting blog post on Transhumanism Rising, author Bryan Appleyard (How to Live Forever or Die Trying) concedes that ”What I like about transhumanists is their naked, unapologetic radicalism… they simply ask, what’s so great about human life as it now is?… transhumanism is a coming thing, a future faith”. But the tone of the article is mostly negative: ”their technophilia is oppressive and naive. Much of the magazine [H+] is just gadgetry with attitude.”.

He also says: ”What I don’t like about transhumanists is the fact that they simply refuse to understand certain arguments of their opponents”. He may have a point here, but I don’t “refuse” to understand their arguments - I just don’t understand them. I don’t understand why disease should be better than health, and death should be better than life. I simply don’t understand it. I have seen loved ones dying, and I can tell you that death is ugly. You know that too. It is understandable that previous generations, unable to imagine life extension and immortality technologies, forced themselves to accept death (if you cannot escape something, you’d better like it). But we are beginning to see that aging and death are engineering problems waiting for engineering solutions. In reply Appleyard quotes Leon Kass, Francis Fukuyama and Bill McKibben, who ”have attacked this idea, arguing, in essence, that death is an essential aspect of our humanity”. This is, to say it in good Latin, BULLSHIT. I consider curiosity, kindness and love for others, and appreciation of beauty and art, as essential aspects of our humanity. NOT DEATH.

I have to say that Appleyard makes an effort to be as fair and objective as possible given his bias, and that the comment thread is surprisingly interesting, with a mix of declared transhumanists, rabid anti-transhumanists, and neutral interested observers. I especially liked the comment of the reader who, referring to Appleyard exhortation ”It’s time to burnish your best pro-death arguments”, replied ”Hey, didn’t Auschwitz already make that argument about as convincingly as it can be made?”.

In a followup post on Transhumanism 2 Appleyard concedes that ”Our accelerating power to transform the world will, inevitably, give us the power to transform ourselves. All sorts of enhancements will occur, not least enormously increased life span. This may not be possible but there are good reasons for thinking it will be.”. But then, prehaps surprised by the transhumanist-friendly attidude of many readers of the first post, he repeats easy and dull non-arguments like ”this is, in part, a consumerist idea - you buy medical immortality much as you would buy a pair of shoes.”.

Disgusting, isn’t it. Buying life as easily and affordably like buying a pair of shoes. It this an outrageous insult to the holiness of suffering and the tragically beautiful mistery of death? Perhaps, but this is precisely what I want: to give everyone on the planet easy and affordable access to more health, more life and, why not, more happiness. This is what transhumanism is about.

Transhumanist spirituality, again

I have been accused, for example by Wesley J. Smith, of interpreting transhumanism like a religion. While I am only proud of being flamed by anti-progress luddites, I have been displeased by seeing Smith’s flames echoed by persons closer to the transhumanist community. I wish to repeat here that, if religion is defined as “seeking to find transcendence and truth, meaning and purpose”, then I am ready and willing to accept the label “religious”. I want to find meaning and transcendence through scientific means and, if I don’t find it, I want to build it. My scientific worldview and my belief in our potential for boundless expansion make me appreciate the plausibility of, for example, omega-point-like scenarios where science and spacetime engineering permit to resurrect the dead. This is very hard to swallow for many transhumanists. Perhaps the communication problem lies in using the world “religion” which has a very negative connotation for some. Maybe “spirituality” would work better. Of course, these ideas generate even stronger debates in conventional religious circles.

I am a full member of the Society for Universal Immortalism and one of the founding members of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, a new group of radical, hardcore transhumanists, also open to spiritual sensibilities, who propose a UNreligion of science with a cosmic engineering plan for tomorrow’s scientists and engineers as well as a memetic engineering plan for today’s world: let’s offer everyone a beautiful cosmic vision of wonder, hope and happiness, firmly based on science and transhumanism.

I am also a full member of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. This may seem a strange place to be for someone who does not believe in any “traditional” God, lives in Europe, has never been in Utah and probably has never met a Mormon face to face, and whose mental image of Mormons, derived from movies, is one of overly serious and zealous people in white shirts, black ties and stiff dresses. To make it even stranger I will disclose that the basic beliefs of Mormons The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), outlined for example here, do not make more sense to me than the articles of faith of other Christian denominations and religions.

But the Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation makes a lot of sense to me:
(1) We seek the spiritual and physical exaltation of individuals and their anatomies, as well as communities and their environments, according to their wills, desires and laws, to the extent they are not oppressive.
(2) We believe that scientific knowledge and technological power are among the means ordained of God to enable such exaltation, including realization of diverse prophetic visions of transfiguration, immortality, resurrection, renewal of this world, and the discovery and creation of worlds without end.
(3) We feel a duty to use science and technology according to wisdom and inspiration, to identify and prepare for risks and responsibilities associated with future advances, and to persuade others to do likewise.
And readers of my blog will know that I am very fond of the spiritual and cosmic visions of Lincoln Cannon and other people in the MTA. Mormon Transhumanists represent the best synthesis of transhumanism and spirituality that I have found. They are also very nice persons who care for each other and for other people on our planet, and the MTA website is by far the best transhumanist community site in terms of both IT implementation and content.

On March 30 Lincoln gave a presentation in Second Life, and explained that Mormonism is more compatible with transhumanism than other Christian denominations and religions because the LDS doctrine is open to the idea of a God evolving in and with the universe and achieving Godhead by means of a technology enabled evolutionary process. Of course not all Mormon would agree (see this interesting discussion). I was quite pleased with Lincoln’s answer to one of my questions, about the possibility that some future civilization may find a way, by extracting all relevant information from the past, to resurrect us by “copying us to the future”. Lincoln answered that this technological resurrection option is an element of his faith, and also mentioned alternative scenarios based on Nick Bostrom’s simulation theory: perhaps those who are running us as simulations may choose to continue running us after our physical death. This answer is in this video clip.

More recently, the MTA has presented The New God Argument at Sunstone 2008: we should ”trust that an advanced civilization more benevolent than us probably created our world”. Not supernatural creation, but engineering work: the authors make many references to the fact that, as we advance toward the capability to create synthetic worlds populated by sentient beings, more and more thinkers are beginning to seriously consider the possibility that we, ourselves, may be sentient beings in a reality computationally created by a higher level of reality (see more comments here). And in a few months there will be an interesting conference on Parallels and Convergences: Mormon Thought and Engineering Vision: ”An assumption can be made that, according to LDS understanding, God is the architect of the Creation and the engineer of our bodies and spirits. Man, on the other hand, is believed to be capable of growing to become like God. The theological question is: where does engineering fit in the convergence of these two realms?”. The list of topics looks like the program of a radical transhumanist conference.

I have been flamed (see above) for writing ”I want our ideas to reach as many people as possible, in a clear and understandable way. Why? Because our worldview can give a sense of meaning of life, a vision of our place in the universe, peace and happiness. This has been the historic function of the world’s great religions, which are now finally beginning to show some fatigue and soon will be completely unable to persuade people more and more culturally sophisticated and used to the scientific worldview… I am very interested in the current experimental activities to create “transhumanist religions”, based on science, but still able to offer hope in “another life” even for those who are already dead. Some information on these experiments, links and my own toughts can be found in my article Engineering Transcendence”. This is why I am so interested in the MTA’s very ambitious project to present transhumanism as a natural consequence of the basic tenets of an established religion and our wildest dreams, transcending biology, eliminating death and achieving Godhead, as part of God’s plan for humankind. I am persuaded that “infecting” established religion with our beautiful and powerful transhumanist memes can only result in a better world and more happiness for more people.

The MTA is a good start, but we should not stop there. The LDS doctrine seems to offer a somewhat easier entry point for transhumanist memes, but what about other Christian denomination and major religions like Islam? I am persuaded that the transhumanist message can be presented in such a way as to be acceptable, while remaining true to its essence, for most religious persons.

And we see more and more people abandoning traditional religions and embarking on their own personal quest for meaning, often joining one or another New Age cult. They leave the beaten path and wander through energy pyramids, crystals, gurus, alternative medicine, meditation, karma, ESP, reincarnation… often falling prey of greedy sharks in the (big) business of spirituality who smoothly steal their money by telling them what they want to hear. Transhumanists are used to making fun of New Agers as naive and gullible people. But I think their honest search for transcendence and purpose is something good and I am sure that, if they were equipped with sharper intellectual tools, they would search meaning in the beautiful cosmic visions of transhumanist thinkers like Moravec, Kurzweil, More, Bainbridge and Gardner. They would not find dogmas and certainties, but reasons for hope. I think the New Age galaxy could represent a very fertile new ground for transhumanist outreach.

H+ Magazine

I was just informed by my good friend DC Spensley (aka Dancoyote Antonelli in Second Life) that the first edition of H+ Magazine is available. Download it here. DC Spensley is Art Director of H+ Magazine, edited by RU Sirius and published by Humanity+.

From RU Sirius’ editorial Humanity Plus: The New Synthesis: ”Our species faces a virtual agora of life-altering, paradigm-changing developments in science, technology and culture. Whether it’s germ-line engineering or molecular computing; advanced AI or cyborg bodies (replaceable parts); engineered hyper-longevity or high-quality performance-enhancing drugs… The glory of transhumanism is that it’s not just a movement of immortalists, or singularitians… It represents nothing less than an attempt to have a realistic discourse about the human future”.

I am now reading Future Mutations: An Interview with RU Sirius. On transhumanism: ”I’m less interested in arguing about whether it’s socially responsible to push forward with all this and more excited by the sense that it’s an irresistible manifestation of a human impulse that has been expressed in various adventure myths involving grail quests, magick, religious imaginings, science fiction imaginings, and so on.”. Of course I went immediately to Amazon to purchase True Mutations, and look forward to voting for the Open Source Party someday.

Extropia speaks to Cosmic Engineers in Extropia

At yesterday’s Cosmic Engineers meeting in Second Life Extropia DaSilva, discussed her series of essays CTRL-ALT-R: REBAKE YOUR REALITY and answered questions from about 30 regular participants and newcomers.

The essays:

CTRL-ALT-R: REBAKE YOUR REALITY
CTRL-ALT-R: REBAKE YOUR REALITY (part 2)
CTRL-ALT-R: REBAKE YOUR REALITY (part 2-2)
Ctrl-ALT R 3: RISE OF THE ROBOTS AND THE JESSIE SIM UNIVERSE
Ctrl-ALT R 3-2: RISE OF THE ROBOTS AND THE JESSIE SIM UNIVERSE

My short summary of CTRL-ALT-R for those who had not had the time to read: a mind boggling ride in the mindscape of wild ideas about the fabric of our reality, fueled by analogies with VR worlds and our best theories of fundamental physics. We are beginning to build synthetic worlds, of which Second Life is only one of the first examples. Soon our synthetic worlds will be sensorially indistinguishable from physical reality, and populated by intelligent beings - artificial intelligences and uploaded copies of ourselves. What does this tell us about the ultimate nature of our reality? Read also my comments on Extropia’s and Moravec’s ideas about reality-as-simulation and technological resurrection in CTRL-ALT-R: Another Life.

Before the Q/A session Extropia offered this short essay:

Rather than discuss any one essay specifically, I thought I might take this opportunity to talk about some things relevant to all of them but were not included in the original texts.

Thank you.

Let me repeat Extropia’s final words: As cosmic engineers, it is our duty to help the universe turn its dreams into reality. This is a beautiful and concise summary of the Prospectus of the Order of Cosmic Engineers.

Some highlights from he Q/A discussion: transhumanists have often discussed these cosmic issues, and VR worlds give these ideas a new spin by helping to visualize them for a more intuitive understanding - perhaps Sasha Chislenko would have loved this. Extropia agrees with my summary of Moravec’s ideas about reality-as-simulation and technological resurrection and thinks the most likely scenario, out of all the ones discussed in the essays, is that probably that we all have copies, infinite numbers of copies in identical universes beyond the light horizon. Tongue-in-cheek, she said “ relax, you are all immortal as far as the multiverse is concerned.”. Some participants felt that these wild speculations are too wild and should not be taken as certainties or beliefs. Most regulars agreed with this and emphasized that we are not offering certainties but only interesting ideas, convictions and intentions, and that this is not necessarily related to the here-and-now. Extropia: “Some people do seem to think that, if we are a simulation, we are not real and so have no need for a consience. But, to the simulated, the simulation IS reality and must be lived according to its internal rules. The supposition that we are in a simulation does not give us the right to abandon morals or the right to preserve our knowledge.”. Most participants, even those more skeptical, agrees that we must begin to move beyond the Earth and the Solar System.

The chat log is here. Note that it is on a public open wiki: most of the active participants have given their permission to our publishing the chat log, but if you do not want your avatar name or something that you said published, just edit it out. I have a new idle speculation about the primary identity of Extropia: perhaps she is Gaia.

CTRL-ALT-R: Another Life

I am reading Extropia DaSilva’s CTRL-ALT-R essays and look forward to discussing them with the author at the Next Cosmic Engineers meeting in Second Life: Discussion of CTRL-ALT-R: REBAKE YOUR REALITY. Parts of the essays deal with CA based digital physics and the possibility that we may live in a simulated reality computed by means of digital physics by another level of reality. The short movie below illustrates resurrection in such a scenario.

Extropia describes cellular automata (CA) and Conway’s Game of Life, the best known example of CA, and writes: ”Working independently of Wolfram, Ed Fredkin believes that the fabric of reality, the very stuff of which matter/energy is made, emerges from the information produced by a 3D CA whose logic units confine their activity to being ‘on’ or ‘off’ at each point in time. ‘I don’t believe that there are objects like electrons and photons and things which are themselves and nothing else. What I believe is that there’s an information process, and the bits, when they’re in certain configurations, behave like the thing we call the electron, or whatever’. The phenomenon of ‘gliders’ demonstrates the ability of a CA to organize itself into localized structures that appear to move through space. If, fundamentally, something like a CA is computing the fabric of reality, particles like electrons may simply be stubbornly persistant tangles of connections. Fredkin calls this the theory of ‘digital physics’, the core principle of which is the belief that the Universe ultimately consists of bits governed by a programming rule. The complexity we see around us results from recursive algorithms tirelessly taking information it has transformed and transforming it further. ‘What I’m saying is that at the most basic level of complexity an information process runs what we think of as the law of physics’… [digital physics] adopts the position that our very thought processes are just one of the things to emerge from the calculations performed by the CA running the Universe.”.

And in another essay: ”If the freely-compounding robot intelligences ultimately restructure space into an expanding bubble of cyberspace consuming all in its path, and if the post-biological entities inherit a curiosity for their past from the animals that helped create them, the 10^86 bits available would provide a powerful tool for post-human historians. They would have the computational power to run highly-detailed simulations of past histories- so detailed that the simulated people in those simulated histories think their reality is…well…’real’… Such conjectures have stunning implications for our own reality. Any freely-compounding intelligence restructuring our Solar System into sublime thinking substrates could run quadrillions of detailed historical simulations. That being the case, surely we must conclude that any given moment of human history- now for instance- is astronomically more likely to be a virtual reality formed in the vast computational space of Mind, rather than the physical reality we believe it to be.”.

If we live in a simulated reality computed by means of digital physics by another level of reality, which may be the primary reality of our computronium based AI mind children in a future time, then we live in a universe with a conceptually simple, and scientifically sound, practical engineering mechanism for our own resurrection, by copying sentient beings living in the sumulated reality (us) to another simulated reality (or even the primary reality itself). Of course we probably cannot even imagine the motivations of computronium superintelligences, but it seems plausible that they would copy and store interesting patterns to run them again. At least, this is what CA and Alife researchers do today. This is illustrated by the short movie CA Resurrection, which I just made with a Game of Life program. The protagonist pattern is doomed to certain death by interaction with an environment that, except in very carefully controlled conditions, is very unfriendly to the stability of patterns (sounds familiar?), but is copied before death and restored to life in a friendlier environment.

Flash streaming version
Quick Time streaming version
Downloadable version (right click and save)

From the Cosming Engineers meeting place one can see the ever changing beautiful futuristic architecture of Port Moravec, and Extropia DaSilva is a fan of Hans Moravec, whose work is discussed in the essays. What does Moravec think about resurrection?

The first published account of his early ideas on mind uploading etc. may be Today’s Computers, Intelligent Machines and Our Future (1978) - ”The machine society can, and for its own benefit probably should, take along with it everything we consider important, up to and including the information in our minds and genes.  Real live human beings, and a whole human community, could then be reconstituted if an appropriate circumstance ever arose”.

Resurrection is mentioned in his books Mind Children and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind: ”In Chapter 6 robots sweep into space in a colonizing wave, but then disappear in a wake of increasingly pure thinking stuff. A “Mind Fire” burns across the universe in Chapter 7. Physical law loses its primacy to purposes, goals, interpretations and God knows what else.”. In the last page of Robot he writes: ”When we die, the rules surely change… Perhaps we are most likely to find ourselves reconstituted in the minds of superintelligent successors, or perhaps in dreamlike worlds (or AI programs) where psychological rather than physical rules dominate. Our mind children will probably be able to navigate the alternatives with increasing facility. For us, now, barely conscious, it remains a leap in the dark.”, and concludes with Shakespeare’s immortal words ”To sleep, perchance to dream...”.

From a 1995 message of Charles Platt to the Cryonel list: ”The question has been asked, is robotics researcher Hans Moravec serious about the possibility of reconstructing a human being from “clues” left behind on an atomic level? The answer is “yes."… I recently did a long interview on this and other topics with Hans, which will appear in the October issue of Wired. He derives a genuine feeling of comfort from his “resurrection by AI” scenario.”.

From the Interview with Hans Moravec by Charles Platt:

I’m a little less hard-core in my atheism than I used to be. And my ideas about resurrection in some ways are not so different from those of early theologians, or from the Greek thought that fed into that.
Moravec foresees a kind of happy ending, though, because the cyberspace entities should find human activity interesting from a historical perspective.
We will be remembered as their ancestors, the creators who enabled them to exist.
As Moravec puts it, “We are their past, and they will be interested in us for the same reason that today we are interested in the origins of our own life on Earth.”
Assuming the artificial intelligences now have truly overwhelming processing power, they should be able to reconstruct human society in every detail by tracing atomic events backward in time. “It will cost them very little to preserve us this way,” he points out. “They will, in fact, be able to re-create a model of our entire civilization, with everything and everyone in it, down to the atomic level, simulating our atoms with machinery that’s vastly subatomic. Also,” he says with amusement, “they’ll be able to use data compression to remove the redundant stuff that isn’t important.”
But by this logic, our current “reality” could be nothing more than a simulation produced by information entities.
“Of course.” Moravec shrugs and waves his hand as if the idea is too obvious. “In fact, the robots will re-create us any number of times, whereas the original version of our world exists, at most, only once. Therefore, statistically speaking, it’s much more likely we’re living in a vast simulation than in the original version. To me, the whole concept of reality is rather absurd. But while you’re inside the scenario, you can’t help but play by the rules. So we might as well pretend this is real - even though the chance things are as they seem is essentially negligible.”
And so, according to Hans Moravec, the human race is almost certainly extinct, while the world around us is just an advanced version of SimCity.

This interview also appeared on Wired.

Next Cosmic Engineers meeting in Second Life: Discussion of CTRL-ALT-R: REBAKE YOUR REALITY

Yesterday’s Cosmic Engineers meeting in Second Life was a spontaneous chat without a predefined theme, a formula that is often the best. Extropia DaSilva, sandwiched between two bunnies in the picture above, mentioned her series of essays CTRL-ALT-R: REBAKE YOUR REALITY, and we thought this will be a good theme for next Sunday meeting. Please read the essays and come to the meeting (on Sundays at 10am PST/SLT (1pm EST, 6pm UK, 7pm Continental EU)) with intelligent or at least interesting questions.

The essays:

CTRL-ALT-R: REBAKE YOUR REALITY
CTRL-ALT-R: REBAKE YOUR REALITY (part 2)
CTRL-ALT-R: REBAKE YOUR REALITY (part 2-2)
Ctrl-ALT R 3: RISE OF THE ROBOTS AND THE JESSIE SIM UNIVERSE
Ctrl-ALT R 3-2: RISE OF THE ROBOTS AND THE JESSIE SIM UNIVERSE

Note - Extropia is not known for writing concise summaries or hermetic haikus. Reading the essays will take some time, but you will be rewarded with a mind boggling ride in the mindscape of wild ideas about the fabric of our reality, fueled by analogies with VR worlds and our best theories of fundamental physics. We are beginning to build synthetic worlds, of which Second Life is only one of the first examples. Soon our synthetic worlds will be sensorially indistinguishable from physical reality, and populated by intelligent beings - artificial intelligences and uploaded copies of ourselves. What does this tell us about the ultimate nature of our reality?

Ctrl-ALT R 3-2: RISE OF THE ROBOTS AND THE JESSIE SIM UNIVERSE: An essay by Extropia DaSilva

Ctrl-ALT R 3-2: RISE OF THE ROBOTS AND THE JESSIE SIM UNIVERSE: An essay by Extropia DaSilva - part 5 of 5

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Ctrl-ALT R 3: RISE OF THE ROBOTS AND THE JESSIE SIM UNIVERSE: An essay by Extropia DaSilva

Ctrl-ALT R 3: RISE OF THE ROBOTS AND THE JESSIE SIM UNIVERSE: An essay by Extropia DaSilva - part 4 of 5

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CTRL-ALT-R: REBAKE YOUR REALITY (part 2-2): An essay by Extropia DaSilva

CTRL-ALT-R: REBAKE YOUR REALITY (part 2-2): An essay by Extropia DaSilva - part 3 of 5

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CTRL-ALT-R: REBAKE YOUR REALITY (part 2): An essay by Extropia DaSilva

CTRL-ALT-R: REBAKE YOUR REALITY (part 2): An essay by Extropia DaSilva - part 2 of 5

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Order of Cosmic Engineers

Associazione Italiana Transumanisti

Transumanar is a transhumanist blog - online magazine on science, technology, politics and culture, edited by Eschatoon. See About (English) and Introduzione (Italiano).

Transumanar e' un blog - rivista online transumanista di scienza, tecnologia, politica e cultura, curato da Eschatoon. Vedi Introduzione (Italiano) e About (English).

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Cosmic Engineers in Second Life

Port Moravec: a Science (and) Fiction sim in Second Life

Most recent entries

• Dove va la biopolitica?
• Second annual Thinkers Lecture, December 7, Second Life
• My doggy’s 10th birthday party, WEBCAST
• Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap
• Cosmic Engineers meeting in Second Life and IRC
• Transhumanism Rising
• Transhumanist spirituality, again
• H+ Magazine
• Extropia speaks to Cosmic Engineers in Extropia
• CTRL-ALT-R: Another Life
• Next Cosmic Engineers meeting in Second Life: Discussion of CTRL-ALT-R: REBAKE YOUR REALITY
• Ctrl-ALT R 3-2: RISE OF THE ROBOTS AND THE JESSIE SIM UNIVERSE: An essay by Extropia DaSilva
• Ctrl-ALT R 3: RISE OF THE ROBOTS AND THE JESSIE SIM UNIVERSE: An essay by Extropia DaSilva
• CTRL-ALT-R: REBAKE YOUR REALITY (part 2-2): An essay by Extropia DaSilva
• CTRL-ALT-R: REBAKE YOUR REALITY (part 2): An essay by Extropia DaSilva

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