Extropia DaSilva, transhumanist avatar
As a transhumanist interested in the Metaverse and active in Second Life, I am an avid reader of Extropia DaSilva’s essays. I should not refer to Extropia as “she” or “he”: in a message posted to the MindX Forum on KurzweilAI, Extropia wrote: ”I’m not gonna tell you my real gender, since I could be lying or telling the truth and you won’t know. Besides which, we should all get used to thinking of each other as ‘people’ since terms like ‘gender’ or ‘human’ should become pretty confused as bio, nano, robotic and IT tech ramps up”. So I should refer to Extropia using Greg Egan‘s gender-neutral “ve, vis, ver” that, according to the sentence quoted, may enter everyday’s language soon. But I will say “she” because that is the gender she has *chosen*, which, for transhumanists, is much more important than the accidental biological birth gender.
Extropia does not have a blog or website of her own (at least none that I was able to find) but is a frequent guest writer on Gwyneth Llewelyn’s blog (one of the best blogs about Second Life, perhaps the best). She is also active in Second Life—her avatar was created in June 2005, which is *very* old in Second Life (SL). I will respect Extropia’s wish to hide her brickspace identity and refrain from speculating on who she might be in Real Life (RL). From her writings, Extropia appears as a hardcore transhumanist who understands the radical implications of exponentially advancing technology. From her Second Life profile: ”the way fantasy and reality combine in SL is reflective of our future when the Net will have guided all consciousness that has been converted to software towards coalescing, and standalone individuals are converted to data to the extent that they can form unique components of a larger complex”.
In her last essay on Gwyneth Llewelyn’s blog titled CTRL-Q: Quantum Time Extropia makes interesting considerations on the simulated reality of the Metaverse and the physical reality of the Universe and observes that these two realities are not so fundamentally different: ”the grand illusion that humans live under is that RL exists out there in physical space… SL appears to be separate from RL by being contained within the confines of a monitor. In fact, both co-exist as information gathered by our senses and interpreted into a model of reality by our brains”. This is, I think, a very useful concept to bear in mind. Soon we will develop the capability to create virtual worlds indistinguishable from physical reality that users will access through direct neural interfaces feeding realistic perceptions to their brains. We will populate virtual worlds with conscious artificial intelligences. Our physical reality itself behaves like a computational process and may well be a simulation running on some powerful supercomputer “elsewhere”. Is physical reality really more “fundamental” than others? From the point of view of conscious observers in a simulated reality, their world is the real world.
Extropia subscribes to the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics: ”the tangle of wave functions are not unreal until an observation picks out one alternative, they are ALL as real as each other. But the reason why we don’t see anything in two states at once is because each wave function corresponds to its own reality” and thinks, as I do, that the concept of “reality” is much more complex and rich of nuances than we usually think. My own thoughts, that I wish to further elaborate, are here.
Extropia thinks that the evolution of technology and the explorations of new modes of being in simulated realities that are beginning, with baby steps, in Second Life and other virtual worlds will result in a ”singular consciousness, in which machine intelligences run billions of human-level intelligences embedded in avatars living in hyper-real cyberspaces”.
In one of her previous essays titled The Metaverse Reloaded, Extropia places Second Life in the context of the social Web, observes that in only a decade the Web has had an explosive growth and evolved from a “library” of information to a powerful many-to-many socialization tool, and makes interesting considerations on the primary purpose of virtual reality: ”it is a tool for communication, providing the means to connect and collaborate with people around the world, forming social groups through shared interests rather than geographical location. This, not escapism, is the chief reason why the growth of online worlds rivals that of Email 15 years ago”. She describes forthcoming computing technologies --fully-realistic synthetic humans in fully-immersive VR worlds; augmented reality, where computer-generated images are blended with reality, as opposed to replacing it (which is what full-immersion VR promises); real-life becoming as connected and efficient at retrieving information as cyberspace; artificial intelligence; computation based on emergent properties like in the biological world-- and observes that eventually this will lead to ”nothing less than a vast intelligence running on a global brain. Billions of human minds entangled in a worldwide network that itself constitutes a computer with a distributed ‘chip’ of a billion PCs, each of which contains approximately a billion transistors”.
Posted by G.P. on 01/10 at 08:45 AM