How to Survive an AI Apocalypse – Part 10: If You Can’t Beat ’em, Join ’em

February 26, 2024 3 Comments

PREVIOUS: How to Survive an AI Apocalypse – Part 9: The Stabilization Effect

In this marathon set of AI blogs, we’ve explored some of the existential dangers of ASI (Artificial Superintelligence) as well as some of the potential mitigating factors. It seems to me that there are three ways to deal with the coming upheaval that the technology promises to lead to…

Part 8 was for you Neo’s out there, while Part 9 was for you Bobby’s. But there is another possibility – merge with the beast. In fact, between wearable tech, augmented reality, genetic engineering, our digital identities, and Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs), I would say it is very much already underway. Let’s take closer look at the technology that has the potential for the most impact – BCIs. They come in two forms – non-invasive and invasive.

NON-INVASIVE BCIs

Non-invasive transducers merely measure electrical activity generated by various regions of the brain. Mapping the waveform data to known patterns makes possible devices like EEGs and video game interfaces.

INVASIVE BCIs

Invasive BCIs, on the other hand, actually connect directly with tissue and nerve endings. Retinal implants, for example, take visual information from glasses or a camera array and feed it into retinal neurons by electrically stimulating them, resulting in some impression of vision. Other examples include Vagus Nerve Stimulators to help treat epilepsy and depression, and Deep Brain Stimulators to treat conditions like Parkinson’s disease.

The most trending BCI, though, has to be the Elon Musk creation, Neuralink. A device with thousands of neural connections is implanted on the surface of the brain. Initial applications targeted were primarily people with paralysis who could benefit from being able to “think” motion into their prosthetics. Like this monkey on the right. Playing Pong with his mind.

But the future possibilities include the ability to save memories to the cloud, replay them on demand, and accelerated learning. I know Kung Fu.

And, as with any technology, it isn’t hard to imagine some of the potential dark sides to its usage. Just ask the Governator.

INTERCONNECTED MINDS

So if brain patterns can be used to control devices, and vice versa, could two brains be connected together and communicate? In 2018, researchers from several universities collaborated on an experiment where three subjects had their brains somewhat interconnected via EEGs as they collectively played a game of Tetris. Two of the subjects told the third, via only their thoughts, which direction to rotate a Tetris piece to fit into a row that the third could not see. Accuracy was 81.25% (versus 50% if random).

Eventually, we should be able to connect all or a large portion of the minds of humanity to each other and/or to machines, creating a sort of global intelligence.

This is the dream of the transhumanists, the H+ crowd, and the proponents of the so called technological singularity. Evolve your body to not be human anymore. In such a case, would we even need to worry about an AI Apocalypse? Perhaps not, if we were to form a singleton with ASI, encompassing all of the information on the planet. But how likely will that be? People on 90th St can’t even get along with people on 91st St. The odds that all of the transhumanists on the planet will merge with the same AI is pretty much zero. Which implies competing superhumans. Just great.

THE IMMORTALITY ILLUSION

In fact the entire premise of the transhumanists is flawed. The idea is that with a combination of modified genetics and the ability to “upload your consciousness” to the cloud, you can then “live long enough to live forever.” Repeating a portion of my blog “Transhumanism and Immortality – 21st Century Snake Oil,” the problem with this mentality is that we are already immortal! And there is a reason why our corporeal bodies die – simply put, we live our lives in this reality in order to evolve our consciousness, one life instance at a time. If we didn’t die, our consciousness evolution would come to a grinding halt, as we spend the rest of eternity playing solitaire. The “Universe” or “All that there is” evolves through our collective individuated consciousnesses. Therefore, deciding to be physically immortal could be the end of the evolution of the Universe itself. Underlying this unfortunate direction of Transhumanism is the belief (and, I can’t stress this enough, it is ONLY that – a belief) that it’s lights out when we die. Following a train of logic, if this were true, consciousness only emerges from brain function, we have zero free will, and the entire universe is a deterministic machine. So why even bother with Transhumanism if everything is predetermined? It is logically inconsistent. Material Realism, the denial of the duality of mind and body, is a dogmatic Religion. Its more vocal adherents (just head on over to JREF to find them) are as ignorant to the evidence and as blind to what true science is as the most bass-ackward fundamentalist religious zealots. The following diagram demonstrates the inefficiency of artificially extending life, and the extreme inefficiency of uploading consciousness.

In fact, you will not upload. At best you will have an apparent clone in the cloud which will diverge from your life path. It will not have free will nor be self aware.

When listening to the transhumanists get excited about such things, I am reminded of the words of the great Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park…

In summary, this humble blogger is fine with the idea of enhancing human functions with technology, but I have no illusions that merging with AI will stave off an AI apocalypse; nor will it provide you with immortality.

So where does that leave us? We have explored many of the scenarios where rapidly advancing AI can have a negative impact on humanity. We’ve looked at the possibilities of merging with them, and the strange stabilization effort that seems to permeate our reality. In the next and final part of this series, we will take a systems view, put it all together and see what the future holds.

NEXT: How to Survive an AI Apocalypse – Part 11: Conclusion

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Wigner’s Friend likes Digital Consciousness

December 26, 2019 3 Comments

Apparently your reality may be different than mine. Wait, what???

Several recent studies have demonstrated to an extremely high degree of certainty that objective reality does not exist. This year, adding to the mounting pile of evidence for a consciousness-centric reality, came the results of an experiment that for the first time, tested the highly paradoxical Wigner’s Friend thought experiment. The conclusion was that your reality and my reality can actually be different. I don’t mean different in the sense that your rods and cones have a different sensitivity, or that your brain interprets things differently, but fundamentally intrinsically different. Ultimately, things may happen in your reality that might not happen in my reality and vice versa.

Almost sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? Or like you and I are playing some kind of virtual reality game and the information stream that is coming into your senses via your headset or whatever is different that the information stream coming into mine.

BINGO! That’s Digital Consciousness in a nutshell.

Eugene Paul Wigner received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1963 for his work on quantum mechanics and the structure of the atom. More importantly perhaps, he, along with Max Planck, Neils Bohr, John Wheeler, Kurt Godel, Erwin Schrodinger, and many other forward thinking scientists and mathematicians, opposed the common materialistic worldview shared by most scientists of his day (not to mention, most scientists of today). As such, he was an inspiration for, and a forerunner of consciousness-centric philosophies, such as my Digital Consciousness, Donald Hoffman’s MUI theory, and Tom Campbell’s My Big TOE.

As if Schrodinger’s Cat wasn’t enough to bend people’s minds, Wigner raised the stakes of quantum weirdness in 1961 when he proposed a thought experiment, referred to as “Wigner’s Friend.” In the scenario are two people, let’s say Wigner and his friend. One of them is in an enclosed space, hidden to the other and observes something like Schrodinger’s cat, further hidden in a box. At the time Wigner opens the box the wave function collapses, establishing whether or not the cat is dead. But the cat is still in superposition to Wigner’s friend, outside of the entire subsystem. Only when he opens the door to see Wigner and the result of the cat experiment, does his wave function collapse. Therefore, Wigner and his friend have differing interpretations of when reality become realized; hence different realities.

Fast forward to 2019, and scientists (Massimiliano Proietti, Alexander Pickston, Francesco Graffitti, Peter Barrow, Dmytro Kundys, Cyril Branciard, Martin Ringbauer, and Alessandro Fedrizzi) at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, were finally able to test the paradox using double slits, lasers, and polarizers. The results confirmed Wigner’s hypothesis to a certainty of 5 standard deviations, which essentially means that objective reality doesn’t exist, and your and my realities can differ- to a certainty of 1 in 3.5 million!

Of course, I live for this stuff, because it simply adds one more piece of supporting evidence to my theory, Digital Consciousness. And it adds yet another nail in the coffin of that ancient scientific religion, materialism.

How does it work?

Digital Consciousness asserts that consciousness is primary; hence, all that we can truly know is what we each experience subjectively.  This experiment doesn’t necessarily prove that the fundamental construct of reality is information, but it is a lot more plausible that individual experiences based on virtual simulations are at the root of this paradox rather than, say, a complex violation of Hilbert space, allowing parallel realities based on traditional physical fields to intermingle.  As an analogy, imagine that you are playing an MMORPG (video game with many other simultaneous players) – it isn’t difficult to see how each individual could be having a slightly different experience, based perhaps on their skill level or something.  As information is the carrier of the experience, the information entering the consciousness of one player could easily be slightly different than the information entering the consciousness of another player. This is by far the simplest explanation, and by Occam’s Razor, supports my theory.

Too bad Wigner isn’t alive to see this experiment, or to ponder Digital Consciousness theory. But I’m sure his consciousness is having a good laugh.

 

Filed under Consciousness, digital consciousness, Philosophy, Physics, Programmed Reality, Quantum Mechanics, Science, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Why the Universe Only Needs One Electron

January 8, 2018 3 Comments

According to renowned physicist Richard Feynman (recounted during his 1965 Nobel lecture)…

“I received a telephone call one day at the graduate college at Princeton from Professor Wheeler, in which he said, ‘Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because, they are all the same electron!’”

John Wheeler’s idea was that this single electron moves through spacetime in a continuous world line like a big knot, while our observation of many identical but separate electrons is just an illusion because we only see a “slice” through that knot. Feynman was quick to point out a flaw in the idea; namely that if this was the case we should see as many positrons (electrons moving backward in time) as electrons, which we don’t.

But Wheeler, also known for his now accepted concepts like wormholes, quantum foam, and “it from bit”, may have been right on the money with this seemingly outlanish idea.

As I have amassed a tremendous set of evidence that our reality is digital and programmatic (some of which you can find here as well as many other blog posts), I will assume that to be the case and proceed from that assumption.

Next, we need to invoke the concept of a Finite State Machine (FSM), which is simply a computational system that is identified by a finite set of states whereby the rules that determine the next state are a function of the current state and one or more input events. The FSM may also generate a number of “outputs” which are also logical functions of the current state.

The following is an abstract example of a finite state machine:

A computational system, like that laptop on your desk that the cat sits on, is by itself a finite state machine. Each clock cycle gives the system a chance to compute a new state, which is defined by a logical combination of the current state and all of the input changes. A video game, a flight simulator, and a trading system all work the same way. The state changes in a typical laptop about 4 billion times per second. It may actually take many of these 250 picosecond clock cycles to result in an observable difference in the output of the program, such as the movement of your avatar on the screen. Within the big complex laptop finite state machines are many others running, such as each of those dozens or hundreds of processes that you see running when you click on your “activity monitor.” And within each of those FSMs are many others, such as the method (or “sub program”) that is invoked when it is necessary to generate the appearance of a new object on the screen.

There is also a concept in computer science called an “instance.” It is similar to the idea of a template. As an analogy, consider the automobile. Every Honda that rolls off the assembly line is different, even if it is the same model with the same color and same set of options. The reason it is different from another with the exact same specifications is that there are microscopic differences in every part that goes into each car. In fact, there are differences in the way that every part is connected between two cars of equal specifications. However, imagine if every car were exactly the same, down to the molecule, atom, particle, string, or what have you. Then we could say that each car is an instance of its template.

This would also be the case in a computer-based virtual reality. Every similar car generated in the computer program is an instance of the computer model of that car, which, by the way, is a finite state machine. Each instance can be given different attributes, however, such as color, loudness, or power. In some cases, such as a virtual racing game where the idea of a car is central to the game, each car may be rather unique in the way that it behaves, or responds to the inputs from the controller, so there may be many different FSMs for these different types of cars. However, for any program, there will be FSMs that are so fundamental that there only needs to be one of that type of object; for example, a leaf.

In our programmatic reality (what I like to call the Reality Learning Lab, or RLL), there are also FSMs that are so fundamental that there only needs to be one FSM for that type of object. And every object of that type is merely an instance of that FSM. Such as an electron.

An electron is fundamental. It is a perfect example of an object that should be modeled by a finite state machine. There is no reason for any two electrons to have different rules of behavior. They may have different starting conditions and different influences throughout their lifetime, but they would react to those conditions and influences with exactly the same rules. Digital Consciousness Theory provides the perfect explanation for this. Electrons are simply instances of the electron finite state machine. There is only one FSM for the electron, just as Wheeler suspected. But there are many instances of it. Each RLL clock cycle will result in the update of the state of each electron instance in our apparent physical reality.

So, in a very real sense, Wheeler was right. There is no need for anything other than the single electron FSM. All of the electrons that we experience are just instances and follow exactly the same rules. Anything else would be inefficient, and ATTI is the ultimate in efficiency.

 

Filed under digital consciousness, Philosophy, Physics, Programmed Reality, Science Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

New Hints to How our Reality is Created

March 10, 2017 11 Comments

There is something fascinating going on in the world, hidden deep beneath the noise of Trump, soccer matches, and Game of Thrones. It is an exploration into the nature of reality – what is making the world tick?

To cut to the chase, it appears that our reality is being dynamically generated based on an ultra-sophisticated algorithm that takes into account not just the usual cause/effect context (as materialists believe), and conscious observation and intent (as idealists believe), but also a complex array of reality configuration probabilities so as to be optimally efficient.

Wait, what?

This philosophical journey has its origins in the well-known double slit experiment, originally done by Thomas Young in 1801 to determine that light had wavelike properties. In 1961, the experiment was performed with electrons, which also showed wavelike properties. The experimental setup involved shooting electrons through a screen containing two thin vertical slits. The wave nature of the particles was manifested in the form of an interference pattern on a screen that was placed on the other side of the double slit screen. It was a curious result but confirmed quantum theory. In 1974, the experiment was performed one electron at a time, with the same resulting interference pattern, which showed that it was not the electrons that interfered with each other, but rather a probabilistic spatial distribution function that was followed by the pattern on the screen. Quantum theory predicted that if a detector was placed at each of the slits so as to determine which slit each electron would go through, the interference pattern would disappear and just leave two vertical lines, due to the quantum complementarity principle. This was difficult to create in the lab, but experiments in the 1980s confirmed expectations – that the “which way did the particle go” measurement killed the interference pattern. The mystery was that the mere act of observation seemed to change the results of the experiment.

So, at this point, people who were interested in how the universe works effectively split into two camps, representing two fundamental philosophies that set the foundation for thinking, analysis, hypothesis, and theorizing:

  1. Objective Materialism
  2. Subjective Idealism

A zillion web pages can be found for each category.

The problem is that most scientists, and probably at least 99% of all outspoken science trolls believe in Materialism.  And “believe” is the operative word.  Because there is ZERO proof that Materialism is correct.  Nor is there proof that Idealism is correct.  So, “believe” is all that can be done.  Although, as the massive amount of evidence leans in favor of Idealism, it is fair to say that those believers at least have the scientific method behind them, whereas materialists just have “well gosh, it sure seems like we live in a deterministic world.” What is interesting is that Materialism can be falsified, but I’m not sure that Idealism can be.  The Materialist camp had plenty of theories to explain the paradox of the double slit experiments – alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics, local hidden variables, non-local hidden variables, a variety of loopholes, or simply the notion that the detector took energy from the particles and impacted the results of the experiment (as has been said, when you put a thermometer in a glass of water, you aren’t measuring the temperature of the water, you are measuring the temperature of the water with a thermometer in it.)

Over the years, the double-slit experiment has been progressively refined to the point where most of the materialistic arguments have been eliminated. For example, there is now the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment, which puts the “which way” detectors after the interference screen, making it impossible for the detector to physically interfere with the outcome of the experiment. And, one by one, all of the hidden variable possibilities and loopholes have been disproven. In 2015, several experiments were performed independently that closed all loopholes simultaneously with both photons and electrons. Since all of these various experimental tests over the years have shown that objective realism is false and non-local given the experimenters choices, the only other explanation could be what John Bell called Super-determinism, a universe completely devoid of free will, running like clockwork playing out a fully predetermined script of events. If true, this would bring about the extremely odd result that the universe is set up to ensure that the outcomes of these experiments imply the opposite to how the universe really works. But I digress…

The net result is that Materialism-based theories on reality are being chipped away experiment by experiment.  Those that believe in Materialist dogma are finding themselves being painted into an ever-shrinking philosophical corner. But Idealism-based theories are huge with possibilities, very few of which have been falsified experimentally.

Physicist and fellow digital philosopher, Tom Campbell, has boldly suggested a number of double slit experiments that can probe the nature of reality a little deeper. Tom, like me, believes that consciousness plays a key role in the nature of and creation of our reality. So much so that he believes that the outcome of the double slit experiments is due strictly to the conscious observation of the which-way detector data. In other words, if no human (or “sufficiently conscious” entity) observes the data, the interference pattern should remain. Theoretically, one could save the data to a file, store the file on a disk, hide the disk in a box and the interference pattern would remain on the screen. Open the box a day later and the interference pattern should automatically disappear, effectively rewriting history with the knowledge of the paths of the particles. His ideas have incurred the wrath of the physics trolls, who are quick to point out that regardless of the fact that humans ever read the data, the interference pattern is gone if the detectors record the data. The data can be destroyed, or not even written to a permanent medium, and the interference pattern would be gone. If these claims are true, it does not prove Materialism at all. But it does infer something very interesting.

From this and many many other categories of evidence it is strongly likely that our reality is dynamically being generated. Quantum entanglement, quantum zeno effect, and the observer effect all look very much like artifacts of an efficient system that dynamically creates reality as needed. It is the “as needed” part of this assertion that is most interesting. I shall refer to that which creates reality as “the system.”

Entanglement happens because when a two-particle-generating event occurs, it is efficient to create two particles using the same instance of a finite state machine and, therefore, when it is needed to determine the properties of one, the properties of the other are automatically known, as detailed in my blog post on entanglement. The quantum zeno effect happens because it is more efficient to reset the probability function each time an observation is made, as detailed in my blog post on quantum zeno. And so what about the double slit mystery? To illuminate, see the diagram below.

If the physicists are right, reality comes into existence at point 4 in the diagram. Why would that be? The paths of the particles are apparently not needed for the experience of the conscious observer, but rather to satisfy the consistency of the experiment. The fact that the detector registers the data is enough to create the reality. Perhaps the system “realizes” that it is less efficient to leave hanging experiments all over the place until a human “opens the envelope” than it is to instantiate real electron paths despite the unlikely possibility of data deletion. Makes logical sense to me. But it also indicates a sophisticated awareness of all of the probabilities of how the reality can play out out vis a vis potential human interactions.

The system is really smart.

Filed under Consciousness, Philosophy, Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Science Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Disproving the Claim that the LHC Disproves the Existence of Ghosts

February 27, 2017 2 Comments

Recent articles in dozens of online magazines shout things like: “The LHC Disproves the Existence of Ghosts and the Paranormal.”

To which I respond: LOLOLOLOLOL

There are so many things wrong with this backwards scientific thinking, I almost don’t know where to start.  But here are a few…

1. The word “disproves” doesn’t belong here. It is unscientific at best. Maybe use “evidence against one possible explanation for ghosts” – I can even begin to appreciate that. But if I can demonstrate even one potential mechanism for the paranormal that the LHC couldn’t detect, you cannot use the word “disprove.” And here is one potential mechanism – an unknown force that the LHC can’t explore because its experiments are designed to only measure interactions in the 4 forces physicists are aware of.

The smoking gun is Brian Cox’s statement “If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist then we must specify precisely what medium carries that pattern and how it interacts with the matter particles out of which our bodies are made. We must, in other words, invent an extension to the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has escaped detection at the Large Hadron Collider. That’s almost inconceivable at the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our bodies.” So, based on that statement, here are a few more problems…

2. “almost inconceivable” is logically inconsistent with the term “disproves.”

3. “If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist…” is an invalid assumption. We do not need information about our cells to persist in a traditional physical medium for paranormal effects to have a way to propagate. They can propagate by a non-traditional (unknown) medium, such as an information storage mechanism operating outside of our classically observable means. Imagine telling a couple of scientists just 200 years ago about how people can communicate instantaneously via radio waves. Their response would be “no, that is impossible because our greatest measurement equipment has not revealed any mechanism that allows information to be transmitted in that manner.” Isn’t that the same thing Brian Cox is saying?

4. The underlying assumption is that we live in a materialist reality. Aside from the fact that Quantum Mechanics experiments have disproven this (and yes, I am comfortable using that word), a REAL scientist should allow for the possibility that consciousness is independent of grey matter and create experiments to support or invalidate such hypotheses. One clear possibility is the simulation argument. Out of band signaling is an obvious and easy mechanism for paranormal effects.  Unfortunately, the REAL scientists (such as Anton Zeilinger) are not the ones who get most of the press.

5. “That’s almost inconceivable at the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our bodies” is also bad logic. It assumes that we fully understand the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our bodies. If scientific history has shown us anything, it is that there is more that we don’t understand than there is that we do.

lhcghosts

Filed under Consciousness, Future Tech, Life, paranormal, Philosophy, Physics, Programmed Reality, Quantum Mechanics, Science Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Transhumanism and Immortality – 21st Century Snake Oil

January 9, 2016 7 Comments

Before I start my rant, I recognize that the Transhumanism movement is chock full of cool ideas, many of which make complete sense, even though they are perhaps obvious and inevitable.  The application of science and technology to the betterment of the human body ranges from current practices like prosthetics and Lasik to genetic modification and curing diseases through nanotech.  It is happening and there’s nothing anyone can to to stop it, so enjoy the ride as you uplift your biology to posthumanism.

However, part of the Transhumanist dogma is the idea that we can “live long enough to live forever.”  Live long enough to be able to take advantage of future technologies like genetic manipulation  which could end the aging process and YOU TOO can be immortal!

The problem with this mentality is that we are already immortal!  And there is a reason why our corporeal bodies die.  Simply put, we live our lives in this reality in order to evolve our consciousness, one life instance at a time.  If we didn’t die, our consciousness evolution would come to a grinding halt, as we spend the rest of eternity playing solitaire and standing in line at the buffet.  The “Universe” or “All That There Is” appears to evolve through our collective individuated consciousnesses.  Therefore, deciding to be physically immortal could be the end of the evolution of the Universe itself.  Underlying this unfortunate and misguided direction of Transhumanism is the belief (and, I can’t stress this enough, it is ONLY that – a belief) that it is lights out when we die.  Following the train of logic, if this were true, consciousness only emerges from brain function, we have zero free will, the entire universe is a deterministic machine, and even investigative science doesn’t make sense any more.  So why even bother with Transhumanism if everything is predetermined?  It is logically inconsistent.  Materialism, the denial of the duality of mind and body, is a dogmatic Religion.  Its more vocal adherents (just head on over to the JREF Forum to find these knuckleheads) are as ignorant to the evidence and as blind to what true science is as the most bass-ackward fundamentalist religious zealots.

OK, to be fair, no one can be 100% certain of anything.  But, there is FAR more evidence for consciousness driven reality than for deterministic materialism.  This blog contains a lot of it, as does my first book, “The Universe-Solved!“, with much more in my upcoming book.

The spokesman for transhumanistic immortality is the self-professed “Transcendent Man“, Ray Kurzweil.  Really Ray?  Did you seriously NOT fight the producers of this movie about you to change the title to something a little less self-aggrandizing, like “Modern Messiah”? #LRonHubbard

So I came across this article about the 77 supplements that Ray takes every day.  From the accompanying video clip, he believes that they are already reversing his aging process: “I’m 65. On many biological aging tests I come out a lot younger. I expect to be in my 40s 15 years from now.”

He has been on this regimen for years.  So let’s see how well those supplements are doing.  Picking an objective tool from one of Ray’s own favorite technologies – Artificial Intelligence – the website how-old.net has an AI bot that automatically estimates your age from an uploaded photo.  I took a screen shot from the video clip (Ray is 65 in the clip) and uploaded it:

Ray Kurzweil Age

85!  Uh oh.  Hmmm, maybe the bot overestimates everyone’s age. I’m 10 years younger than Ray.  Let’s see how I fare, using a shot taken the same year at a ski resort – you know, one of those sports Ray says to avoid (Ray also claims that his kids will probably be immortal as long as they don’t take up extreme sports):

JimHowOld

I don’t know if it is the supplements that make Ray look 20 years older than he is, or the extreme skiing that makes me look 13 years younger than I am.  But I’m thinking maybe I’m onto something. [Note: I do realize that the choice of pictures could result in different outcomes.  I just thought it was ironic that the first two that I tried had these results]

Yes, I’m fairly confident that these supplements have some value in improving the function of various organs and benefiting a person’s overall health and well being.  I’m also fairly certain that much of traditional medical community would disagree and point to the lack of rigorous scientific studies supporting these supposed benefits as they always do.  On the whole, I suspect that, on the average, supplements might extend one’s lifetime somewhat.  But I doubt that they will reverse aging.  The human body is far too complex to hope that adding a few organic compounds would be sufficient to modify and synchronize all of the complex cellular and systemic metabolic chemical reactions toward a reversal of the aging process.  Kurzweil is obviously a very bright man who has had a significant entrepreneurial legacy in the high tech world.  However I think he and the rest of the materialist transhumanists are way over their heads on the topic of immortality and our place and purpose in the Universe.

My suggestion, Ray… skip the supplements, skip the self-promotion, skip the Google plugs, drive your goddamn car, and don’t be afraid to be active.  Stick with high tech, leave the evolution of the universe to its own devices, and enjoy the rest of this life.

Filed under AI, Consciousness, Future Tech, Life, Nanotech, Philosophy, Science Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Which came first, the digital chicken, or the digital philosophy egg?

December 31, 2014 3 Comments

Many scientists, mathematicians, futurists, and philosophers are embracing the idea that our reality is digital these days. In fact, it would be perfectly understandable to wonder if digital philosophy itself is tainted due to the tendency of humans to view ideas through the lens of their times. We live in a digital age, surrounded by computers, the Internet, and smart phones, and so might we not be guilty of imagining that the world behaves just as a multi-player video game does? We probably wouldn’t have had such ideas 50 years ago, when, at a macroscopic level at least, everything with which we interacted appeared analog and continuous. Which came first, the digital chicken, or the digital philosophy egg?

Actually, the concepts of binary and digital are not at all new. The I Ching is an ancient Chinese text that dates to 1150 BCE. In it are 64 combinations of 8 trigrams (aka the Bagua), each of which clearly contain the first three bits of a binary code. 547px-Bagua-name-earlier.svg

Many other cultures, including the Mangareva in Polynesia (1450), and Indian (5th to 2nd century BCE), have used binary encodings for communication for thousands of years. Over 12,000 years ago, African tribes developed a binary divination system called Odu Ifa.

German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz is generally credited as developing the modern binary number system in 1679, based on zeros and ones. Naturally, all of these other cultures are ignored so that we can maintain the illusion that all great philosophical and mathematical thought originated in Europe. Regardless of Eurocentric biases, it is clear that binary encoding is not a new concept. But what about applying it to the fundamental construct of reality?

It turns out that while modern digital physics or digital philosophy references are replete with sources that only date to the mid-20th century, the ancient Greeks (namely Plato) believed that reality was discrete. Atoms were considered to be discrete and fundamental components of reality.

A quick clarification of the terms “discrete”, “digital”, “binary”, “analog”, and “continuous” is probably in order:

Discrete – Having distinct points of measurement in the time domain

Digital – Having properties that can be encoded into bits

Binary – Encoding that is done with only two digits, zeros and ones

Analog – Having continuously variable properties

Continuous – The time domain is continuous

So, for example, if we encode the value of some property (e.g. length or voltage) digitally using 3 values (0, 1, 2), that would be digital, but not binary (rather, ternery). If we say that between any two points in time, there is an infinitely divisible time element, but for each point, the value of the measurement being performed on some property is represented by bits, then we would have a continuous yet digital system. Conversely, if time can be broken into chunks such that at a fine enough temporal granularity there is no concept of time between two adjacent points in time, but at each of these time points, the value of the measurement being performed is continuously variable, then we would have a discrete yet analog system.

In the realm of consciousness-driven digital philosophy, it is my contention that the evidence strongly supports reality being discrete and digital; that is, time moves on in “chunks” and at each discrete point in time, every property of everything can be perfectly represented digitally. There are no infinities.

I believe that this is a logical and fundamental conclusion, regardless of the fact that we live in a digital age. There are many reasons for this, but for the purposes of this particular blog post, I shall only concentrate on a couple. Let’s break down the possibilities of our reality, in terms of origin and behavior:

  1. Type 1 – Our reality was created by some conscious entity and has been following the original rules established by that entity. Of course, we could spend a lifetime defining “conscious” or “entity” but let’s try to keep it simple. This scenario could include traditional religious origin theories (e.g. God created the heavens and the earth). It could also include the common simulation scenarios, a la Nick Bostrom’s “Simulation Argument.”
  1. Type 2 – Our reality was originally created by some conscious entity and has been evolving according to some sort of fundamental evolutionary law ever since.
  1. Type 3 – Our reality was not created by some conscious entity, and its existence sprang out of nothing and has been following primordial rules of physics ever since. To explain the fact that our universe is incredibly finely-tuned for matter and life, materialist cosmologists dreamt up the idea that we must exist in an infinite set of parallel universes, and via the anthropic principle, the one we live only appears finely-tuned because it has to in order for us to be in it. Occam would be turning over in his grave.
  1. Type 4 – Our reality was not created by some particular conscious entity, but rather has been evolving according to some sort of fundamental evolutionary law from the very beginning.

I would argue that in the first two cases, reality would have to be digital. For, if a conscious entity is going to create a world for us to live in and experience, that conscious entity is clearly highly evolved compared to us. And, being so evolved, it would certainly make use of the most efficient means to create a reality. A continuous reality is not only inefficient, it is theoretically impossible to create because it involves infinities in the temporal domain as well as any spatial domain or property.

pixelated200I would also argue that in the fourth case, reality would have to be digital for similar reasons. Even without a conscious entity as a creator, the fundamental evolutionary law would certainly favor a perfectly functional reality that doesn’t require infinite resources.

Only in the third case above, would there be any possibility of a continuous analog reality. Even then, it is not required. As MIT cosmologist and mathematician Max Tegmark succinctly put it, “We’ve never measured anything in physics to more than about sixteen significant digits, and no experiment has been carried out whose outcome depends on the hypothesis that a true continuum exists, or hinges on nature computing something uncomputable.” Hence there is no reason to assume, a priori, that the world is continuous. In fact, the evidence points to the contrary:

  • Infinite resolution would imply that matter implodes into black holes at sub-Planck scales and we don’t observe that.
  • Infinite resolution implies that relativity and quantum mechanics can’t coexist, at least with the best physics that we have today. Our favorite contenders for rationalizing relativity and quantum mechanics are string theory and loop quantum gravity. And they only work with minimal length (aka discrete) scales.
  • We actually observe discrete behavior in quantum mechanics. For example, a particle’s spin value is always quantized; there are no intermediate states. This is anomalous in continuous space-time.

For many other reasons, as are probably clear from the evidence compiled on this site, I tend to favor reality Type 4. No other type of reality structure and origin can be shown to be anywhere near as consistent with all of the evidence (philosophical, cosmological, mathematical, metaphysical, and experimental). And it has nothing to do with MMORPGs or the smart phone in my pocket.

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Macroscopic Coherence Explained

December 9, 2014 1 Comment

Coherence is a general property of a system whereby the components of that system all act in a similar manner. Coherent light is what makes lasers what they are – an alignment of photons, or waveform phases (why cats chase them is a little harder to explain). Superconductivity, a property of zero resistance to electrical flow that was formerly only observed at temperatures near absolute zero, is closely related in that the atoms of the superconducting material are aligned coherently. Quantum entanglement is an example of perfect coherence between two or more particles, in that they act as a single particle no matter how far away from each other you take them. Einstein famously referred to this property as “spooky action at a distance.” The Bose-Einstein condensate is another state of matter that exists at extremely low temperatures and involves a system of particles that have all achieved the lowest quantum state, and hence, are coherent.

Over the years, clever experimental scientists have pushed the boundaries of coherence from extreme cryogenics and quantum scales to room temperatures and macroscopic scales. Author and fellow truth seeker Anthony Peake posted an article today about experiments that are being done at various research institutes which demonstrate how the contents of liquid containers connected by arbitrarily thin channels exhibit “action at a distance” macroscopically.

Once again, such anomalies have scientists scratching their heads for explanations; that is, scientists who cling to the never-proven pre-assumed dogma of objective materialism. Entanglement and macroscopic action at a distance find no home in this religion.

However, over here at “Consciousness-based Digital Reality” Central, we enjoy the simplicity of fitting such anomalies into our model of reality. 🙂

It all follows from three core ideas:

  1. That all matter is ultimately comprised of data (“it from bit” as John Wheeler would say) and that forces are simply the rules of how the complex data structures that form particles interact with each other.
  1. That consciousness, which is also organized data, interacts with the components of reality according to other rules of the overall system (this greater System being “reality”, “the universe”, God, “all that there is” or whatever you want to call it).
  1. The System evolves according to what Tom Campbell calls the “Fundamental Rule.” Similar to evolution, the system changes state and evolves in the direction of more profitable or useful states and away from less useful states.

Because of #3, our system has evolved to be efficient. As such, it would likely not be wasteful. So, when an observer observes (consciousness interacts with) a pair of particles in proximity to each other, the system sets their states (collapsing the wave function) and the rules of their behavior (a finite state machine) to be coherent simply out of efficiency. That is, each particle is set to the same finite state machine, and forever behaves that way no matter how far apart you take them (distance being a virtual concept in a virtual digital world).

So what prevents the same logic from applying to macroscopic collections of coherent particles? Nothing. In fact, it is inevitable. These clever scientists have learned methods to establish a coherent identical quantum state across huge quantities of particles (aka macroscopic). At the point in which the experimenter creates this state and observes it, the system establishes the state machines for all of them at once, since they are all to be in the same quantum state. And so we get room temperature superconductivity and macroscopic containers of liquid that demonstrate non-locality.

carl

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Continuity of Self

July 5, 2014 1 Comment

Dr. Pim van Lommel presents an interesting question in his book “Consciousness Beyond Life” regarding the continuity of consciousness: “Every day, fifty billion cells are broken down and regenerated in our body. And yet we experience our body as continuous… Every two weeks all of the molecules and atoms in our body’s cells are replaced. How can we account for long-term memory if the molecular makeup of the cell membrane of neurons is completely renewed every two weeks and the millions of synapses in the brain undergo a process of constant adaptation (neuroplasticity)?” Further, he notes that since quarks and gluons are destroyed and reconstituted every 1E-23 seconds, effectively so are our bodies. How then does it appear continuous?

Our cells can live independently of our bodies, so effectively “we” are a large network of cells, much in the same ways that beehives are large networks of bees and computer networks are large networks of interconnected computers. In these cases, it is fairly easy to identify that the whole is the sum of the parts, while allowing the parts to be swapped out. If a few bees die and some new bees join the colony, one still sees the entire hive as continuous, although it might undergo continuous change. So the puzzle at the core of this question is not a philosophical debate about the validity of the existence of a large identifiable structure, but rather the existence of something that is truly continuous despite the replacement of its parts, such as human consciousness.

Or is it continuous? Are you the same person you were yesterday? Can we say to the judge: “Your honor, that wasn’t me that stole the car on that date. I was a different person then.”?

What links our past to our present (and hence, generates the appearance of continuity) is our structure for memories. If I lost every memory when I slept at night, would I even have the sense of having a continuous consciousness? Or, to flip the argument around, is it really the central database of memories in our brains that makes us have a continuous consciousness? The research actually supports the idea that the sense of “continuity of self” extends beyond mere memory recollection. For example, patients who have full retrograde amnesia, completely incapable of recollecting a single event from their past, nonetheless have the sense of a continuous personal identity1 and often show no personality change after the event that triggered the amnesia2,3.

This would seem to suggest that since “sense of self” is greater than simply memories, our consciousness is either due to some as yet unknown aspect of the brain that maintains a continuity of “self” aside from memory, or it is a superset of brain function entirely.

Given the evidence that values and personality extend beyond the brain and the preponderance of other evidence that a consciousness exists beyond the brain, it seems likely that continuity of self is just one more data point that supports the consciousness driven digital reality model.

  1. Klein, Stanley B., “Memory and the Sense of Personal Identity”, University of California, Santa Barbara (http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~snichols/Papers/MemoryandSenseofPersonalIdentity.pdf)
  2. Brooks, DN and W McKinlay, “Personality and behavioural change after severe blunt head injury – a relative’s view” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 1983;46:336-344.
  3. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/374514/memory-abnormality/23519/Traumatic-amnesia

6 future-self continuity

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Materialism BS

March 23, 2014 1 Comment

<rant>

I have never before used my blog to rant about someone else’s writing. But I came across a rather humorous attempt at scientific reporting that is unfortunately all too common in its tone, inaccuracies, and presumptive style and I just can’t resist.

The article appeared in Gizmodo’s supposedly edgy spinoff blog SPLOID and purports to reveal an amazing new discovery that for the first time explains scientifically how out of body experiences (OBEs) are produced by the brain.

Here is a partial list of logical flaws in this report:

1. “This is the very first time that this type of experience has been analyzed and documented scientifically” – Researcher Celia Green must be having a good chuckle at this considering that she analyzed and documented hundreds of OBE accounts over 45 years ago.

2. “this may be the first documented case of someone who can get into this state at will” – Robert Monroe must be guffawing from one of the remote rings, given that he and William Buhlman each had hundreds of experiences and were able to predictably initiate OBEs decades ago.

3. “This is not an astral trip, like those described by mystics. There’s no paranormal activity of any kind.” – This is where the article really crosses over into fiction.  Really?  No paranormal activity of any kind?  You’re sure about that?  Let’s consider an analogy.  The argument that the author gives for this claim is that since the fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) showed brain activity in regions “associated with kinesthetic imagery” that the experience must come from the brain.  First of all, “associated with” is hardly the kind of phrase that would warrant a definitive conclusion.  Second, science is not about definitive conclusions.  Science is about evidence and theories, not conclusions, facts or proofs.  The most definitive thing the science can provide is falsifiability when an observation negates a particular hypothesis.  However, in this case, it is the opposite – the University of Ottawa study is simply generating evidence that one person’s OBE correlates to some activity in a particular region of the brain – certainly not the stuff of facts, proofs, or even much of a theory.  The referenced paper is appropriately restrained in its conclusions, unlike the Gizmodo article, which takes silly leaps of logic.  So anyway, back to that analogy.  Let’s say that we break open my cell phone and attach some test equipment – an oscilloscope or logic analyzer – to some contact point in the circuitry.  My friend sends me a text message and, lo and behold, the test equipment activates.  Oooh, that must mean that the text was initiated from that part of the cell phone circuitry, rather than from the mind of my BFF.  NOT!

4. “The fact is…scientists believe that these out-of-body experiences are a type of hallucination triggered by some neurological mechanism.”  Sorry, Jordan, not clear where you get this “fact.”  You have made a sweeping generalization of the beliefs of all scientists.  Have you checked with all of the scientists?  Or did you mean to say “some scientists?”  Because most scientists with open minds would argue to the contrary.

</rant>

iphoneinside400

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