From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Mar 26 2003 - 14:23:28 MST
On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> This kind of
> "immortality by delegation" is actually interesting from a
> functionalist perspective. If you are defined by your function,
> by what you do, then you could actually be replaced by another
> external system doing the same functions.
By this argument it seems that a significant fraction of what
much of humanity engages in could be replaced by "functional"
equivalents over the next decade or two.
> This is really what uploading is about.
No! What uploading is "about" is being able to produce a
distributed replicated intelligence as I discussed at Extro3.
Without that entities are limited by their hazard function
which on average is 2000-7000 years (depending on whose figures
you are working with).
> But as my colleauges have pointed out, why
> not replace myself by a set of very good actors? These actors
> would learn everything relevant about the behavior and
> motivations of me, and eventually take my place.
Of course the question becomes whether a collection of actors
emulating Anders would be as creative as Anders...
> My own argument
> against this is of course that many of my internal processes
> which are only (and can only be) privately known such as my
> consciousness, would not be transferred in such a scheme.
Yea, but we don't care about *your* consciousness (except in
a very general humanitarian way). [Of course there may be
exceptions for those list members who are actually in love with
Anders.] The two flaws I see against this are (a) Can the
actors replicate Anders creativity? [In which case the global
community could care less if the Anders upload suffers a UPS
failure]; or (b) is Anders unemulatable? Anders, perhaps more
than many others, has a sufficient public record that his
perspective can be known, deduced, projected. Would Anders
claim that neuvo-Anders could not be produced by computational
systems with 10x - 100x - 1000x the computational capacity of Anders?
One has to keep in mind that the computational capacity of a *single*
node of an MBrain (i.e. a Drexlerian nanocomputer) is 10^5 to 10^6
times that of a single human brain.
Regarding Saddam, a recent U.S. PBS special discussing him revealed
that his private library is filled with books discussing Stalin's
perspective and methods. The world is better off with him (and
his ideas) either dead or frozen until we can come up with a
reasonable strategy for reforming them.
Robert
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