Randall
J. Randall Murphy
I don't know. We're just having an informal discussion using various ideas a sort of sounding board to see where it might lead.
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Substrate-independent minds
- Thread starter mike
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Randall
J. Randall Murphy
Correction: The last stuff I had was Mag Sense. Now use this stuff. It works even better:
Notice this one even says "Relieves restless legs."
!FWIW the regular calcium/magnesium supplements in pill form had no effect.
S
smcder
Guest
The only reason I'm discussing my healh issues is for a kind of street cred on skepticism.
It may well be that all of these future technologies are the answer to humanity's probkems ... but I just don't think so. I think the Transhuman condition will be an upgrade of the human condition.
And you can see I'm not a luddite. I'm a chimera already with artificial substances as part of my body and cutting edge treatments coming up. (to avoid other cutting edges!)
But here's the thing I think is missed because it's so simple - problems scale up with solutions. It's what drives technological development and it seems to me Transhumanism is technological development, not evolution ... the Iphone didn't evolve it was developed ... two different processes. And I don't think there has been any discussion of the corporate side of this. I fully expect any upgrades I receive to come with extremely complicated warranty processes ... I hope no one expects to get a self healing cyber body and never get contacted by the manufacturer again ... and if you think pop-up adverts are annoying on your computer, they are going to be really bad in your head. Now I get at some point the singularity comes in and this all changes - but if corporations are in this process all along, there's a good chance that'll be part of the singularity too - it may be entirely what drives it ... instantaneous, self healing consumerism.
- that's the funny thing about the Transhuman narrative ... Transhumans have infinite freedom to decide their own future because they've solved all the problems that made them Transhuman ... there's a paradox there or bad thinking on my part.
It may well be that all of these future technologies are the answer to humanity's probkems ... but I just don't think so. I think the Transhuman condition will be an upgrade of the human condition.
And you can see I'm not a luddite. I'm a chimera already with artificial substances as part of my body and cutting edge treatments coming up. (to avoid other cutting edges!)
But here's the thing I think is missed because it's so simple - problems scale up with solutions. It's what drives technological development and it seems to me Transhumanism is technological development, not evolution ... the Iphone didn't evolve it was developed ... two different processes. And I don't think there has been any discussion of the corporate side of this. I fully expect any upgrades I receive to come with extremely complicated warranty processes ... I hope no one expects to get a self healing cyber body and never get contacted by the manufacturer again ... and if you think pop-up adverts are annoying on your computer, they are going to be really bad in your head. Now I get at some point the singularity comes in and this all changes - but if corporations are in this process all along, there's a good chance that'll be part of the singularity too - it may be entirely what drives it ... instantaneous, self healing consumerism.
- that's the funny thing about the Transhuman narrative ... Transhumans have infinite freedom to decide their own future because they've solved all the problems that made them Transhuman ... there's a paradox there or bad thinking on my part.
I think so. I think Panksepp would agree. He begins, as you'll recall, with 'affectivity' even in primitive organisms, the germinal sense of an organism's relatedness to its ecological niche, its world. The bridge between 'self' and 'other', self and world, eventually mind and world is the critical difference that life brings into the otherwise trackless, unlit depths of physical being.[/QUOTE]
I meant the examples of sleep, blindness and paralysis ... @mike seems to be suggesting they indicate consciousness doesn't need the prerequisites listed ... I'm not challenged by the other cases ... but I think a mind permanently unplugged from the body wouldn't be sane by our standards ...[/QUOTE]
Evidently I'm not running on all cylinders tonight. Second time I've misread posts.
ps: hope you get that med refill soon. @ufology's suggestion of a sufficient calcium/magnesium supplement is a good one. As I recall, magnesium is a major nutrient that is inadequately provided in our standard diets, and it should always be matched with twice the calcium to the amount of magnesium.
S
smcder
Guest
Correction: The last stuff I had was Mag Sense. Now use this stuff. It works even better:
FWIW the regular calcium/magnesium supplements in pill form had no effect. Notice this one even says "Relieves restless legs."
It will definitely work better as there is a blonde with a Nordic name on the container!
I think that's the idea behind the vaporub on the feet too. I could crush up some magnesium tabs and mix them in the Vicks.
Hmmm ... I may be Transhuman before the night is over.
S
smcder
Guest
I meant the examples of sleep, blindness and paralysis ... @mike seems to be suggesting they indicate consciousness doesn't need the prerequisites listed ... I'm not challenged by the other cases ... but I think a mind permanently unplugged from the body wouldn't be sane by our standards ...[/QUOTE]
Evidently I'm not running on all cylinders tonight. Second time I've misread posts.
ps: hope you get that med refill soon. @ufology's suggestion of a sufficient calcium/magnesium supplement is a good one. As I recall, magnesium is a major nutrient that is inadequately provided in our standard diets, and it should always be matched with twice the calcium to the amount of magnesium.[/QUOTE]
I'll get everything tomorrow - I could get it tonight - 24 hour pharmacy but it would be a two hour odyssey ... now that is a limitation of the brain I would fix, I even got a reminder and all I had to do was go to my phone app and touch a couple of buttons and I would have received an automatic reminder ... instead stuff came up at work and several hours later I was home with twitchy legs ...
I read a study of physicians and it was found that either slightly less or slightly more than half took prescription antibiotics as prescribed ... the rest stopped taking them or skipped several days despite knowing better than anyone that this would not only be ineffective but might increase the risks of infection ...
on the other hand, there do seem to be those perfect people who do all that kind of stuff right ... maybe they are the Borg among us.
Here's a page on MagSmart that provides the list of ingredients. There's a lot of good stuff in there.
Magsmart by Lorna Vanderhaeghe
A lot of them are amino acids which provide better absorption of magnesium. The best way to get amino acids is to use brewer's yeast, also a powder as Magsmart is, and to blend it with fruit, fruit juice or milk, and yoghurt. Be careful to start slow (small) with brewer's yeast and build up over three or four weeks from a half-teaspoon to one or two tablespoons in the blended concoction. Yoghurt, oranges, orange juice, banana work together well. Drink it just after you've blended it. Magnificent. You'll get used to the taste and love it.
Magsmart by Lorna Vanderhaeghe
A lot of them are amino acids which provide better absorption of magnesium. The best way to get amino acids is to use brewer's yeast, also a powder as Magsmart is, and to blend it with fruit, fruit juice or milk, and yoghurt. Be careful to start slow (small) with brewer's yeast and build up over three or four weeks from a half-teaspoon to one or two tablespoons in the blended concoction. Yoghurt, oranges, orange juice, banana work together well. Drink it just after you've blended it. Magnificent. You'll get used to the taste and love it.
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smcder
Guest
I'd like to get at that last paradox better and at the differences between technological development and evolution ... @mike referred to the evolved biological "platform" as rickety and disease and error prone ... but I don't see any basis in the history of technology to see where a developed platform would fair better ... what seems to be the case is that you go through lots and lots of individual models that get tweaked at enormous cost (see fighter jet development) and scrapped along the way and then end up fit only for very highly select environment and functions whereas the evolved uses available materials (which happen to have remarkable properties) has ways of degrading gracefully, can heal and reproduce and these are all based on a kind of finitude sure (but they do reproduce) - but what's the oldest functioning piece of complex technology out there? ... and how does it compare to a thousand year old tree and its ecosystem and that's the other part of my rebuttal is that what we see as the disease and error prone parts are integral to the system - we arbitrarily cut off at the individual level - but I'm not an autonomous independent unit, I'm constantly exchanging with the environment - every single breath is an exchange of information and material - life as @mike describes as a platform to me sounds like living in a space suit.
It's got to be personality differences and models and metaphors, assumptions about the world. Maybe both kinds of processes, evolved and developed are needed. And maybe Transhumanism has all of that already. I don't know that much about it.
It's got to be personality differences and models and metaphors, assumptions about the world. Maybe both kinds of processes, evolved and developed are needed. And maybe Transhumanism has all of that already. I don't know that much about it.
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smcder
Guest
yes ... sounds much better than a dopamine agonist of the non-ergoline class doesn't it??
A dopamine agonist is a compound that activates dopamine receptors in the absence of that receptor's physiological ligand, the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine agonists activate signaling pathways through the dopamine receptor and trimeric G-proteins, ultimately leading to changes in gene transcription.
'Changes in gene transcription' doesn't sound like a plus. Check my last post again for more information on the amino acids in MagSmart. Very good for you, and can also be obtained from brewer's yeast.
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smcder
Guest
And I think we've gotten past it - but there was some excluded middle (I'm using that phrase any where I can for reasons I'll explain in a minute) in the thread earlier ... for example @Soupie said there would be early and late adopters and luddites, but what I see in the high tech world we are living in now is a range of options - not discrete categories - I work in a public library and people come in to log in for an hour at a time to a PC/mac - the future prediction was a computer in every home ... but what that has morphed into is a computer in every phone ... the uses for a sit down computer are such that when you need it (watching movies, playing some games - ever tried applying for a job on a smart phone?) you need it - but not enough that you can afford it to be your primary computing device ... and no one lugs a laptop around - a few and guess what they come in to use our free Wi-Fi. And ... we still send Faxes. It's slow but it works beautifully and it's pretty much hack proof. People come in every week to fax their time cards, jobs apps, student loan information, food stamp and housing applications ... using decades old technology ...
so ... instead of either/or we've not gotten the conversation around to what I want to call "naked" (or here in the south "nekkid") Transhumanism ... like Hermit crabs grabbing a shell ... I could see a future where I walk in to the public library and grab a shell appropriate to what I want to do ... a nano suit to transform my material being ... a VR suit to go on an adventure ... a meditation shell that enhances certain brain waves or a study shell to learn a language in a few hours ... then at the end of the day I de-shell and go human and go home ...
Husband: "Hi honey, how was your day? How was Alpha-Centauri?"
Wife: "Oh you know, another day ... another Gazorbanite."
both laugh with a comfortable familiarity ...
... and in the meantime maybe the shells have healed my body or slowed aging or made other enhancements if I want ... but I'm still human and I get all the benefits of the Transhuman ... it seems like we could have both ... in effect becoming more human, because this is how we use almost all technology, we pick it up, put it on and take it off - we don't have a history of becoming our technology.
so ... instead of either/or we've not gotten the conversation around to what I want to call "naked" (or here in the south "nekkid") Transhumanism ... like Hermit crabs grabbing a shell ... I could see a future where I walk in to the public library and grab a shell appropriate to what I want to do ... a nano suit to transform my material being ... a VR suit to go on an adventure ... a meditation shell that enhances certain brain waves or a study shell to learn a language in a few hours ... then at the end of the day I de-shell and go human and go home ...
Husband: "Hi honey, how was your day? How was Alpha-Centauri?"
Wife: "Oh you know, another day ... another Gazorbanite."
both laugh with a comfortable familiarity ...
... and in the meantime maybe the shells have healed my body or slowed aging or made other enhancements if I want ... but I'm still human and I get all the benefits of the Transhuman ... it seems like we could have both ... in effect becoming more human, because this is how we use almost all technology, we pick it up, put it on and take it off - we don't have a history of becoming our technology.
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smcder
Guest
I'll try it and I'm open to trying lots of things ... I saw a Naturopath and one of the outcomes is that the nutrition and other things she prescribed were enormously expensive and time consuming ... and of course not covered by insurance.
One of the things you realize about medicine is that the consumer model is such that meds are what you can make of them to take once a day ... in other words it doesn't just happen that you know all of these meds are optimally taken one time a day in a small white pill form at the same time ... here's an example, I take a beta blocker for blood pressure ... it wears off in 24 hours so that I notice a real difference in my heart rate. When I was working out really intensely I gamed it by scheduling my workouts at the end of the 24 hour period ... then my cardio was effective - if I did it before that, I couldn't get my HR into the training range because of the beta blocker. So really that's a med that probably needs to be in the system at a constant level throughout the day or maybe a variable level depending on your activity but you can't sell a pill that someone has to take every hour.
In the evenings when my prednisone wears off I crash out completely for a couple of hours, literally in the middle of whatever I'm doing ... but again, I'm not going to take 2.5 grams of medicine every couple of hours throughout the day even though that would be optimal. So there I can see some kind of future technology coming in - but you still have have an economic model that covers it. This is where natural medicine really loses out except, ironically, among those who are time and money rich. Who can in effect afford to be sick.
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smcder
Guest
Another term might be "highest tech" meaning that which responds to our human nature ... Heidegger's Hammer was a tongue in cheek example but it makes the point - Heidegger says the hammer is zuhande - "at hand" and so the highest tech version is always at hand ... in other words if you needed a hammer, you simply start swinging and there it is ... the technology serves you ... his concern about technicity was that it was the other way around.
And in fact, technology might seem to be using us to develop itself - maybe in the same way brute matter used the existing conditions of the universe to form what would ultimately be us ... in that way technology is parasitic on us and might some day achieve a kind of sentience in which we, in effect, are the substrate - to tie it all back in some kind of "strange loop". Like other hosts we might never be fully aware of this. Or ...
Back to highest tech - my utopia is one in which technology is seamless, with essentially no human cost - the technology is in total service to us (probably this is in violation of every law in the book) - if I'm walking in the forest and I want to talk to my friend (and my friend wants to talk to me) that is what happens. I might be instantly transported there - but only if my friend wants it too - in the same way we negotiate distance in conversation ... always the technology in service of the human ... we want things instantly but that's not true - what we want is to want things instantly not to get them instantly - we learned that as kids - its an immediate route to boredom, getting what you want at the instant you want it. That last bit is in service to the technology, not the human.
And in fact, technology might seem to be using us to develop itself - maybe in the same way brute matter used the existing conditions of the universe to form what would ultimately be us ... in that way technology is parasitic on us and might some day achieve a kind of sentience in which we, in effect, are the substrate - to tie it all back in some kind of "strange loop". Like other hosts we might never be fully aware of this. Or ...
Back to highest tech - my utopia is one in which technology is seamless, with essentially no human cost - the technology is in total service to us (probably this is in violation of every law in the book) - if I'm walking in the forest and I want to talk to my friend (and my friend wants to talk to me) that is what happens. I might be instantly transported there - but only if my friend wants it too - in the same way we negotiate distance in conversation ... always the technology in service of the human ... we want things instantly but that's not true - what we want is to want things instantly not to get them instantly - we learned that as kids - its an immediate route to boredom, getting what you want at the instant you want it. That last bit is in service to the technology, not the human.
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smcder
Guest
So I guess there's two visions - one in which technology is in charge and turns us into the machine and I argue this is not what history teaches us, rather that we use the technology, it serves us, we bend it to our will, we pick it up and we put it down ... and it even becomes another environment we explore and challenge and in the course of that maybe these explorations spare the eco-system around us and even enhance it ... as we integrate the technology into the environment instead of making it the environment - we don't live in steel and glass but go back home as Odysseus did, to the savannah, the forest, the jungle - the garden (oh and we might linger a bit on Calypso's island too ... ;-)
Our communication and computational devices grow and flower - we cultivate organic telephony and video/VR systems - we grow them alongside our food - we cross fertilize and hybridize:
"honey, pick up the phone ... it's ripe and ... it's for you!" ;-)
Luddite, indeed.
Our communication and computational devices grow and flower - we cultivate organic telephony and video/VR systems - we grow them alongside our food - we cross fertilize and hybridize:
"honey, pick up the phone ... it's ripe and ... it's for you!" ;-)
Luddite, indeed.
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smcder
Guest
So this is where we come back to the Excluded Middle ... Western logic begins with:
The Law of the Excluded Middle
The Law of Non-contradiction
Eastern thought ... Buddhism anyway, which came out of Hinduism ... starts with:
Mindfulness - keeping something in mind, a basic skill
Awareness - being aware of what comes into the mind
Disciplined pplication of the first two laws of logic applied over 2500 years will get you the Western tradition in logic and mathematics and science (ok, not necessarily but it begins there and then you can "nail soup" it ... similarly disciplined application of the two skills in meditation will begin to reveal the Dhamma or wisdom in terms of an equanimous and insightful mind - again with a few geniuses thrown in here and there.
So these four basic things seem to tie together man's dual nature, the two hemispheres of the mind and the Eastern and Western traditions.
And I think it would take such a synthesis - such a complete human being to produce a civilization that could tame it's technology, transform it in the way I describe above ... and that would be my vision of the future.
The Law of the Excluded Middle
The Law of Non-contradiction
Eastern thought ... Buddhism anyway, which came out of Hinduism ... starts with:
Mindfulness - keeping something in mind, a basic skill
Awareness - being aware of what comes into the mind
Disciplined pplication of the first two laws of logic applied over 2500 years will get you the Western tradition in logic and mathematics and science (ok, not necessarily but it begins there and then you can "nail soup" it ... similarly disciplined application of the two skills in meditation will begin to reveal the Dhamma or wisdom in terms of an equanimous and insightful mind - again with a few geniuses thrown in here and there.
So these four basic things seem to tie together man's dual nature, the two hemispheres of the mind and the Eastern and Western traditions.
And I think it would take such a synthesis - such a complete human being to produce a civilization that could tame it's technology, transform it in the way I describe above ... and that would be my vision of the future.
A brilliant manifesto for a sane transhumanism, Steve. Let me be the first to sign it. Maybe you should blog it to some of the AI websites and forums, or send it to one of their journals for publication. I think it could change a lot of current thinking of the either/or variety, and not a moment too soon.
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smcder
Guest
We form relationships and attachments with everything, so a human technology, "highest technology" would be capable of responding ... it would be optimally anthropomorphized - it would have what ever amount of the human necessary for what it does ... cars would protect and respond to our urgency or our sense of adventure, clothing could "detect and reflect" our moods ... etc. Agents would be as intelligent as needed and some might be able to hive together to flexibly respond in terms of increased intelligence as needed.
the tragic side is that if technology is adapting to us as its substrate, its evolutionary driving force - then it's adapting to our tendency to discard what we can't fully relate to and it will embody that eventually. Frankenstein's creature is the paradigm case - but we have e-waste and light, sound and air pollution and one could make many parallels to another controversial topic. (but one won't)
Whereas if we develop a technology we can relate to - and I think this has interesting parallels to what we've tried to do in esoteric, magic and religious spheres - then both we and our technology can co-evolve as we and our dogs have and can live together richly. But this means some independence for technology in the same environment to avoid parasitism. Where in the long run that might lead, I don't know - but I'd rather develop a relationship along the way - if intelligent machines are going to evolve anyway. I've not seen but I'm sure many sci-fi scenarios show human/AI relationships of this interdependent kind. Perhaps we even loan or share the conscious aspect of our being for example to the machines that store memories and experience.
the tragic side is that if technology is adapting to us as its substrate, its evolutionary driving force - then it's adapting to our tendency to discard what we can't fully relate to and it will embody that eventually. Frankenstein's creature is the paradigm case - but we have e-waste and light, sound and air pollution and one could make many parallels to another controversial topic. (but one won't)
Whereas if we develop a technology we can relate to - and I think this has interesting parallels to what we've tried to do in esoteric, magic and religious spheres - then both we and our technology can co-evolve as we and our dogs have and can live together richly. But this means some independence for technology in the same environment to avoid parasitism. Where in the long run that might lead, I don't know - but I'd rather develop a relationship along the way - if intelligent machines are going to evolve anyway. I've not seen but I'm sure many sci-fi scenarios show human/AI relationships of this interdependent kind. Perhaps we even loan or share the conscious aspect of our being for example to the machines that store memories and experience.
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smcder
Guest
In short, intelligence/"personality" is distributed throughout the environment at the points at which its needed and in the amounts it is needed - it's seamless/transparent with the environment and humans needs and can be picked up and put down as needed, this includes augmenting human abilities - you can plug in and unplug, in essence this augmentation itself is tool-like, so we use it as naturally as we do traditional tools. The human/machine divide remains but the interface is more personal.
I can definitely see down-sides and limits to this and it's nothing new I'm sure - but it's my first crack at a vision for the future and I'd like to hear that of others!
I can definitely see down-sides and limits to this and it's nothing new I'm sure - but it's my first crack at a vision for the future and I'd like to hear that of others!
A few questions:
"[Schneider] added she ‘wouldn’t be surprised if in 50 years we have the internet wired to our brains.’"
Why would that be a good thing since half, probably more, of what's reproduced on the internet is nonsense? I also wonder how any 'intelligence' glutted with the 'information' occupying the world wide web could think two consecutive purposeful thoughts.
And I wonder about the source of the pressure being insinuated into popular thought that our species needs to hook itself up to artificial information processing platforms in order to be ready to interact with extraterrestrials we only presume to be artificial intelligences (based on Hollywood movies).