Thanks. :) Be sure to check out Ellen Jorgensen's talk on biohacking if you haven't already, I think what she is describing is very close to what you wrote about.

That's a very good question. I think there are at least three different aspects to it: philosophical, psychological and practical.

The first category is one which I am more than happy to leave for others to ponder.

Psychologically, I have witnessed vastly different attitudes toward other living creatures: from people treating pets as full-fledged family members, through indifference to outright cruelty. The kinder, gentler attitude seems to be a modern phenomenon, more common the further removed one is from the realities of the food chain (a "fun" factoid I just looked up: some 25 million chickens are slaughtered every day in the US alone, and I think we all know how most of them live; there is nothing kind or gentle about it). There is a widespread belief that kids benefit from growing up with pets, and some evidence that it may actually be true. Based on what I saw growing up with a sequence of dogs, a bunch of birds, miscellaneous rodents and the occasional reptile, I think it would be pretty straightforward (and more humane - I was a lively kid...) to replicate the experience using virtual pets. It may be hard to fool a real dog into thinking that a simulated one is real, but fooling a human is pretty easy.

The practical aspect is the serious one. Flavio Mercati has written an essay which pays homage to currently fashionable views (and which therefore can be expected to do very well in the contest) and advocates "solutions" like only eating game meat, but which also gets some things right. One of them is that there are vast amounts of energy of raw materials awaiting exploitation in space. Another is that the biological diversity of Earth is truly rare, and therefore precious. He is sticking to the 60s script of space colonization, with humans turning other planets into new Earths by terraforming, and in that model, the more species you have to work with, the more likely you are to find a viable mix capable of supporting a robust biosphere in the new environment. The script is dated, but he does have a point: diversity is good.

That won't matter to inorganic Humans 3.0, but it could bite Humans 2.0. Their life support system will need to provide them with things like glucose and amino acids. Ideally, those would be synthesized, but initially at least they could come from a handful of plant species (Soylent is essentially based on rice, oat, canola and microalgae; in The Millennial Project, Savage was big on blue-green algae). Since they will be working with a completely engineered environment, it will be tempting to optimize everything, down to cloning a few particularly productive organisms, and call it a day. The result would be a monoculture, with all that entails: very efficient as long as it works, but very fragile when something goes wrong. So as a purely practical matter, it would be in their interest to maintain a larger selection of species.

I think that line is already drawn for us by the definition of "virtual". It means not physically existing as such, but made to appear so (Oxford dictionary). So it's not a question of artificial vs. natural. The English castle inhabited by Stanley Kubrik was artificially constructed but nevertheless real, while the fairy-tale castles offered in your Matrix are virtual and thus unreal.

Nor is it a question of retaining vs. shedding the "Cro-Magnon body". An artificial body can still experience reality, which is mostly what matters when it comes to exploring real space. Here the virtual hardly matters at all. Any human (0.3 - 3.0 and beyond) can experience the virtual when there's a personal need for it. This goes without saying. But the systematic provision of self-indulgent fantasies is likely to prove counter-productive when promoted as part and parcel of the real business of exploring and colonizing space. Do you see what I mean?

You raise multiple objections. Let's disentangle them:

1) Things which exist physically are real, things which do not exist physically are "virtual and thus unreal".

2) In your previous comment you used the words "priceless reality" and "virtual sham". You also compared virtual reality to fantasizing and to "opium dens". I take this to indicate a strong rejection on your part of any experience that is not physical.

3) You point out that experiencing reality "is mostly what matters when it comes to exploring real space".

4) You claim that an artificial body can do the job without virtual reality.

5) You fear that being able to experience what you want in virtual reality will reduce interest in going out and experiencing and colonizing space.

My responses follow separately, since we seem to have hit some post length limit here. :/

1) I guess you are not big on philosophy. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but you should at least be aware that you are implicitly endorsing a particular philosophical position, and that others exist. Plato might ask why you confer greater reality to the imperfect physical world than to the digital one. I will more modestly point out three things:

1a) Objects created in a virtual world have a physical basis too. With enough work, I could point out exactly which circuits and memory cells are used to store the properties of any such object. Those are made of atoms, just like the things you consider more real. You could counter that those atoms don't matter much, since they will be swapped out as the virtual object is moved around in memory; I would counter that the atoms which make up your own body don't matter much either, since they are continuously being swapped out too by your breathing, eating etc. What makes you you is an information pattern, not the particular atoms currently used to store it.

1b) You do not experience physical reality. No, you really don't. What you experience is an internal model maintained by unconscious parts of your brain, puzzled together from inputs provided by your sensory organs; your own biologically generated virtual world, if you will. Cognitive scientists have fun ways to punch holes in the illusion that you are perceiving things as they are, like various optical illusions. You could also ask yourself if the basic building blocks of your experience of physical reality, such as "color", really make sense outside your mind. Sure, a color usually (see that color illusion) corresponds to some set of wavelengths, but your perception of it is an enconding which only exists inside your head, and quite possibly differs from my or somebody else's encoding of the same set of wavelengths.

1c) You seem to be taking for granted that the physical world is not itself a simulation.

As an aside, the first version of my essay included a comic chosen specifically to remind readers of all this. Unfortunately I had to remove it after the organizers got nervous about potential licensing issues. :(

2) I suppose your strongly value-laden choice of words reflects some sort of personal aversion to... actually, I am not sure to what. Right now you are participating in a discussion on a virtual forum which only exists in a computer somewhere, quite possibly (I'm too lazy to check) on a virtual machine spun out to one or more physical machines as the need arises. Is this discussion we are having a "virtual sham" and not really happening, since we are not having it by old-fashioned paper mail? Or would it really need to be carried out in person, using (instantly dispersed) sound waves to count as part of "priceless reality"? How about by phone? There would still be sound waves involved, but along the way they would be converted to analog electric signals, then to digital ones, then to light pulses carried by optical fibers, and then back again by the inverse chain. Would that discussion be made less real by transiting through the digital realm?

Again, my view is that the information pattern is what counts, not the particular substrate currently being used to carry it.

3) If your purpose is exploration, you obviously need to go get the data. Of course, you will generally want to use better sensors than the very limited ones which come with a natural human body, and we already do. But maybe you mean something else; maybe you mean to say that the purpose of venturing into space is something like tourism, to experience the thing firsthand, with your own senses. If so, I am afraid your experience will be a very brief one: pick any currently known destination, and it will be over in less than twenty seconds. That's being optimistic, assuming that you just wanted to experience vacuum. The most physical and survivable experience you could have is the inside of a space suit. The sound would be that of your own body, mainly your breathing and pulse, and of your comm radio. The sight would be what you can expect through a thick visor plus a head-mounted display. Your skin and muscles would mostly be complaining about how surprisingly laborious it is to move inside one of those things. If you have any sense, you will prefer to stay in your shirt sleeves, inside a cozy cabin, and interact with what's outside through machines.

Having said all that, the primary purpose of the expansion into space which I and others have written about would not be exploration. The primary purpose would be economic and ultimately existential, i.e. to ensure our long-term survival. Exploration would be a necessity, just like oil prospecting is a necessity for oil companies and (currently) to keep our technological infrastructure running.

4) Artificial bodies capable of satisfactorily replacing ours are both harder to create and less desirable than the Matrix. They are harder to make because they require the same life support system and BCI, plus a mechanical body (with associated control and sensor systems) capable of powering and carrying them around within the size constraints of a human body, and good enough to match the performance of a natural one. That's a very tall order; I would definitely not be happy with a half-measure like Robocop's body. They are less desirable, because such a body will be at least as bulky as a natural one, probably heavier (so no gain for space), and less secure, less versatile and consequently more expensive than the Matrix.

The Matrix will be created first simply because it's easier, and for reasons which initially will have nothing to do with space. It will then dawn on its creators and residents that the separation of psychological requirements (satisfied by a virtual body in a simulated world) from physical infrastructure allows optimization of the latter for the task at hand. I remind you again that space is not what our bodies are built for. A mechanical body built specifically for space exploration and exploitation would not look like a human being; it would look like a space probe. You could put a human brain in such a body, but that brain would go nuts. The same brain will be quite happy living in a familiar-looking, simulated body, and working a job using whichever hardware device its current task in the physical world happens to call for. It's the difference between driving an excavator and being turned into one.

In case you wonder about the "less secure" and "less versatile" part, it comes down to the same reason we have data centers now: resource sharing. Put a bunch of brains in a common data center, and they can share common shielding, power and life support systems more robust and with more built-in redundance than what would fit in a human-sized body. They can also share physical devices instead of having a full set each; assign them to three 8-hour shifts, and even if everybody needs to use the same kind of device, there need only be 1/3 the number you would need if everybody was soldered into one. And it will always be safer to control a big heavy machine doing mechanical work from some distance, rather than being right next to (or inside) it.

5) Your final objection is analogous to saying that people should not have nice houses, because if they did, they would no longer be interested in going outside. Maybe there is some truth to that, but it turns out that getting and keeping those nice houses requires money, which is typically obtained by getting out the door and/or interacting with others through electronic communication networks (you know, virtually). I guess this objection is related to number (3), i.e. the idea that experience-seeking exploration is the main purpose of expanding into space. But it won't be. Space will be where the residents of the Matrix go to work.

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  • Post #45

Tommy,

I have to say I avoided reading your essay because I think moving off the planet in any serious technological fashion is delusion, for many of the reasons you list in your essay. Yet having read various of your comments on other threads, it's obvious you are an extremely intelligent person and this essay doesn't disappoint. I still think it's delusional though. Though we may be the mechanism by which elemental biology does project itself to other worlds, it isn't as an organized and recordable method.

I have to say I approach the world situation from a much more bottom up, organic process/direction and I perceive projections upward and outward as cyclical and presuming to project our current progress as to continue compounding out among the stars as overlooking a lot of the negative feedback currently built up in this system. I suppose you might pigeonhole me as a doom and gloomer, but I think there is a great deal of opportunity in this situation as well. There is a lot of energy and potential leverage in collapsing systems and as the concept of punctuated equilibrium argues, these are the best opportunities for real change. As such I think any issue of steering humanity for our generation, or the next several, would be much more planetary, than cosmic.

Personally, if the way biology functions is any lesson, life on this planet would be evolving toward being a global organism, with human civilization as its functional central nervous system. Currently though, we are simply top predator in a collapsing ecosystem and to change that will require much more introspection of who and what we are, than trying to project current methods and assumptions in a forward fashion. For one thing, there is a great deal of conceptual diversity built into the system, to where we do already function quite well as either hive minds, or individual operators, depending on circumstance. It is almost an electromagnetic function.

I think there are numerous unexamined aspects of how we function. In my own entry I point out the dichotomy of energy and information is manifest in our physiological dichotomy of an information processing central nervous system and energy processing in the digestive/respiratory systems, with the circulatory system as its delivery mechanism. This primarily to lead up to what I see as the current major fallacy in our civil functioning, ie. treating money as a commodity, rather than a contract.

There are many other aspects to physiology reflecting reality. For another, I see the two hemispheres of the brain as a thermostat(scalar) and clock(linear) processor. Primarily we like to have enough information/energy coming in to be interested, ie, not bored, but not so much as to get frustrated/angry/overheated.

So if we want to begin to peel away the layers of what it means to be alive, it isn't so much a function of simply expanding our mental processing out to ever more area, but understanding the dichotomy of awareness and knowledge. Our sense of awareness is that innate sense of self, which knowledge is the information it absorbs and manifests. You might say awareness is like an energy constantly expanding outward, while information is the form and structure it manifests and which give it shape. This sets up a conflict actually, as the sense of awareness is constantly testing and pushing the boundaries of this form, while the form tends to restrain and define it. So if you were to start packaging this sense of self into forms it can corrode and break down, it will. As the old saying goes, life is the leading cause of death.

Which all goes to say that while some of your hypotheses may be valid, in the distant future, there are significant hurtles to overcome.

Regards,

John Merryman

    Thank you for calling me delusional (twice) and for clearing up a lingering doubt induced by your dispatch from May 1:

    And on a conceptual level, it does seem many of these entries are out of 20th century science fiction. We haven't been back to the moon in forty years and how many of these entries are going on about populating the universe and moving off the planet after we have finished trashing it!!!! Do these people even bother to go out side and look up at the sky and really appreciate just how far away everything is and how little there is that we can actually work with?

    The doubt being, of course, whether you had actually read the entries in question.

    I would also be remiss were I not to express my deep gratitude for disclosing, after you finally found the time to read my humble contribution, that

    while some of your hypotheses may be valid, in the distant future, there are significant hurtles to overcome

    This shocking revelation was more than worth the effort of parsing the 615 words preceding it. It goes without saying that my inability to extract any further information from your, I am sure, absolutely brilliant, well argued, deeply knowledgeable and extensively referenced critique is entirely due to failings of my own.

    Tommy,

    Sorry to not be on the bandwagon, but the devil is in the details.

    Regards,

    John

    Bandwagon...? Oh well, if you could divine those devilish details two weeks before even reading the thing, I guess you can see a bandwagon coming, too. Two weeks again? I can't wait! :)

    Tommy,

    We live in a world where enormous resources are used primarily for creating ever more elaborate weapons of war and extravagant expressions of ego. How is that not an overriding issue in any discussion of how to navigate the future? Yet you seemed shocked I question the need to project extremely far into the future and out across space!

    There is a very evident mechanism and process by which value is extracted from all forms of interaction and exchange by monetary systems design for private gain, rather than public utility. Go back to Andrew Jackson and his feuds with the bankers. Right now we have hundreds of trillions in derivatives and other forms of debt and leverage, built into an economy with annul world productivity in the tens of trillions. It is a system, a effectively mechanical system, operating according to generally understandable mathematic principles, by which the health, not just of the planet, but the human economy it supposedly intended to support, is being sacrificed to production and accumulation of this notational value, which far exceeds any ability to actually make good on it.

    Yet of all these supposedly bright and clever people, who are well versed in math and other forms of abstract logic, there are only two entries which even mention it directly, mine and Stefan Weckbach's, while a few others hint at it obliquely.

    Human society is a great mechanism. Why cannot we examine it as such and determine where it might be broken? The way we are going, we are like those Easter Islanders, who destroyed their environment to create their totems. Yet people just get mad or ignore me when I try to point out these are issues which need to be discussed and addressed. If you are going to intelligently postulate the future of multiple civilizations arising from this one, it would seem small potatoes to consider some elemental financial plumbing issues which are driving this one to ruin. Is it just not worth your time?

    Regards,

    Jon

    Hi Tommy,

    I admire high aim. You have got it.

    Thanks for your interesting essay on technology.

    Don Limuti

      Tommy,

      Congratulations on a very interesting essay! I enjoyed your writing style, and your tongue-in-cheek remarks such as "To those who really think that the world would be better off without people, all I can say is: after you" or "If you think we have a global warming problem now, just wait another billion years". The tone of most of the essays in this contest is sooooooooooo serious...

      What I like the most about your essay is that it does not suffer from "Failure of Imagination" (as defined by Arthur C. Clarke, as you mention): when thinking about the future, I deplore the fact that too many people fail to even take into consideration the possibility that Humanity 1.0 may fairly soon no longer be the only way to be human. It is difficult to know in advance what Humanity 2.0 will look like, but you certainly have presented many intriguing possibilities. I also like how you stressed the importance of the expansion of humanity in space, while being critical of some scenarios (like a Mars colony without a clear "business plan").

      I think your essay deserves to make it to the finals, and I have rated it accordingly. Good luck!

      Marc

        Well, now we misunderstand each other completely. I pressed my point too hard. Here it is plainly: your essay would be stronger if you dropped the virtual reality.

        Not that I'd characterize your essay as weak. I now think it both brave and rash.

        One more question please, Tommy. - You claim on page 6, "A human mind which works 106 times faster needs a body which moves 106 times faster." - Why? - Mike

          How do you propose to keep a disembodied brain happy without virtual reality?

          Let's make the thought experiment that I have a magical button which, when pressed, makes your brain work 10^6 times faster than normal. I press it. What happens?

          For all practical purposes, your world freezes solid. One second of wall time is now 11.6 days of your subjective time. Unless your brain has been hacked to handle this situation, you suffer immediate sensory deprivation; even sensory neurons firing 100 times a (wall) second to tell your brain what's going on are now only firing once every 2.8 of your subjective hours, so you are effectively blind, deaf and floating in space without a body. Within a few subjective hours you lose the ability to think clearly, you become emotionally unstable and then you start hallucinating. If I let go of the button after just one second, you will have set a new endurance record, but you may now be irreversibly insane.

          Let's assume that your brain has been hacked to overcome the sensory problem: when I press the button, you don't go blind and deaf, you just see a still image of the world, and maybe I stream you some music and some faked sensory information to keep you from going nuts. So you feel a little better, but only a little, because you are suddenly locked in concrete. Normally, you are constantly moving. Your eyes dart around, you blink, your fingers twitch, your body shifts back and forth, redistributing the load between muscles. Most of it is borderline conscious until you start thinking about it. Now it just stops. You are completely paralyzed, unable to do anything. Your immediate, instinctive reaction is to fight the force which suddenly seems to be restraining you, but nothing happens. By the time you've rationalized what's going on and calmed down, several subjective seconds' worth of maximum force control signals are on their way to your muscles. Those are between 0.1 and 1.5 meters away, so travelling at 100 m/s, your orders will reach them in 1000 to 15 000 subjective seconds. After half an hour you start getting sensory feedback telling you that your first commands were executed, followed by increasingly painful reports of the consequences, spread out over the next 8 hours. From the outside, it looks like you are having a violent fit, flailing about uncontrollably, and probably harming yourself badly in the process.

          You can't control a body with such long lag times. Even without panicking about it, having to wait hours to get feedback on an order to move a finger completely breaks the normal control loop "move a little towards target, compare new position to desired location, repeat if necessary".