Gods in the judeo-christian sense mean all knowing which will be partially
true as an upload since your brain will have access to the sum of human
knowledge pooled into a vat of ideas stored all over the internet. Being a
God also means having the power to create life and with nano, or even
closer to our present time: genetic engineering. We have almost filled the
requirements for being a judeo-christian god. Why would I need a super-AI
for any of this? Human brains can already be make to multitask stemming
from multiple personality disorder where multiple people can live out of
the same brain. I am pretty sure that very few of the general population
will upload if there is no virtual reality to live in. People will want to
go through the uploading process as themselves with little difference and
then proceed to make changes when desired. (They want to make sure they
make it across the transition ok). The only people I can figure who'd
upload without a virtual reality would be chronically depressed people,
people nearing death and wishing to save their lives, or body haters. If we
can look to our current virtual reality algorithms such as in games like
Tekken 2, and Super Mario 64 we can pretty much bet that we _will_ have a
superb virtual reality to dip into when uploading comes around about 2030.
>Yes, I would definitely start working on building worlds (not entire
>universes at first), but their complexities are still limited by the
>amount of computation power we have - and that will be limited and cost
>money too. Read _Permutation City_ by Greg Egan for some ideas.
You need not even render them! You can describe them in fine detail on
paper or in a text file and when truely simple VRML design tools come
around, you can begin building these worlds and gradually upgrade them to
the next design format standard that comes out and continually increase the
detail till uploading time comes.
>The problem I see with many of the uploading scenarios I hear on this list
>is that they are all too often of the kind "And after you are uploaded,
>you become God." It isn't that simple - working uploading won't change
>your mind very much (if it did, it wouldn't be you that emerged in
>cyberspace).
Won't change your mind much? Hows knowing the sum of human knowledge sound?
Remember with uploading you fill the requirements for a judeo-christian god
which is the god-like being standards which most people refer to.
>So when you are 'reborn' you will be an emulation of 10^11
>neurons, their activity and lots of other pseudobiological data. Of
>course, self-transformation now becomes almost too trivial (remember to
>make backups often!) and you will be able to change much of your
>structure.
Why in even a primitive upload you will have some sort of virtual
environment such as looking through the eyes of an avatar in Alpha World or
having the first person perspective of the player in quake. You will have
some sort of sensory data coming in or it would be torture to sit in stasis
waiting for technology to increase to the point of good VR. Especially as
an uploaded being, waiting for sufficently advanced VR would be torture
because if your mental processes are _much_ faster, one day of waiting may
seem like 10 years and this is a very conservative estimate.
>But you won't immediately be able to go far beyond your old
>limits, they have to be untangled and enhanced away. This will require a
>lot of *work*. It will quite likely be painful and tiring (in a mental
>sense). It will take time.
It would be alot of work but you'd enjoy every bit of it because you're
doing it for yourself and your could even program yourself to release
endorphins through the entire process. Painful and tiring? You're no longer
limited to chemistry and physics so you can secrete unlimited amounts of
any brain hormone and keep your neural pathways in tip top shape.
>The exception may be uploading through gradual extension: when you become
>100% uploaded, you are already quite evolved. But you are still far from
>being a god.
Ahhh there we go. The way I wish to be uploaded will be through gradual
incremental uploading so that "I" will be the uploaded, virtual, digital,
being rather than a digital duplicate running around as me. I could care
less if my ideas were the only thing that transferred to the digital realm.
I want to live in it! ME! ME! ME!