Re: Uploaded Omniscience

From: Hubert Mania (humania@t-online.de)
Date: Thu Jun 26 2003 - 01:54:17 MDT

  • Next message: Alfio Puglisi: "Re: Uploaded Omniscience"

    Lee Corbin wrote:

    > Now imagine a trillion cameras throughout the Earth
    > and solar system, equally responsive to you in a
    > similar way. Yes, you can see the insides of
    > particular machines that are running you, or at
    > least their cases, but you can also see all the
    > locations at which you used to live, all the cities,
    > mountains, deserts, and faraway moons and planets.
    > And you need do no more than, so it seems, move
    > your eyes.
    >
    > Cries of freedom, knowledge, and liberation from
    > provincialism will issue from the first truly
    > uploaded, and will go far to persuade their brethren
    > of the advantages.

    Beautiful vision. A preliminary stage of that goal would be a kind of
    virtual riding out before breakfast which has always been one of my
    favourite dreams. To log in the cameras of different satellites, to inspect
    my favourite places on the planet, to float calmly over the Aegean Sea and
    beckon the ships over, pilot them generously through the strait of Corinth
    with a wave of my hand and switch to another satellite camera that zooms to
    the peak of Mount Everest where I can see the last steps of a roped party in
    high resolution.

    I would not be interested in real omniscience though. I would rather call it
    a kind of *omni part taking* without the intention to rule over situations
    or people, an anarchical observer state in the Kantian sense of
    "interesselosem Wohlgefallen" (indifferent pleasure).

    The abuse that arises in animal brains while being logged into trillions of
    cameras is obvious. First we have to get rid of greed and lust for power.
    And I believe, this state of mind is much harder to achieve than a first
    class consciousness transfer or an omnipresent camera system. The
    moral obligation to appease reptile and monkey layers in our brains
    seems to be the more urgent task in my opinion.



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