Re: The Spike
Rick Knight (rknight@platinum.com)
Thu, 14 Aug 97 10:48:12 CST
Eliezer wrote (in regards to banal speculations by the "uninformed"
regarding post-Singularity fashion sense <G>):
Needless to say, I really don't have the faintest idea of what they'll
come up with. For all I know, the Back-To-Nature movement could be in
2040 or 2060; but it's the only fashion trend that I, an unmodified
human, would be even vaguely able to understand.
I respond:
Eliezer tends to trigger stuff for me (in a good way). I read about
someone's out-of-body visit to a several-milleniums away future where
entities were not bound to any physical thing. They inhabited and
experienced what they pleased. They kept human bodies preserved in
membranes that they buried beneath a tree and brought out when they
wanted to do the human thing. Otherwise, they would fuse their
consciousness with any thing: a thunderhead, a salmon, an eagle, the
wind. In the case of the fish/eagle thing, they would jump from one
to the other and co-experience the adrenaline rushes of both the
hunter and hunted. The entities *knew* and were expecting their
visitor from present day Earth. In fact they could read each other's
thoughts. The author noted that there were no children but there were
animals. The entities of a much more sparsely populated and
return-to-nature appearing Earth were preparing to leave the planet.
I like to think that if/when we upload, our first computers that will
receive us will be quickly relegated to primitive prosthetics (not
counting virtual realities which may make the silicon digs more
comfy). A handful of things considered, our knowledge and
capabilities will likely become (what we'd now consider) god-like and
we will be able to use the sand on a beach, the photons in a moon
beam, or the drops of water in a cloud to interface with. Why not?
Science meets God and there is no distinction between us and the
omnipotence we've projected out in front of us for all of human
civilization.
Rick