I forked a
digression on DRK vs XMR warez to address what the author said about transhumanism.
If you transfer yourself into the digital world, you're obviously only creating a copy if the original can still exist at the same time. The whole thing is a logical fallacy. There's no such thing as "transhumanism", only a movement to create a copy machine for humans for some unknown reason. We can already do this now for physical creatures with cloning, yet nobody does it. Doing this with a digital creature is the same difference, except it would store and interpret data faster, but it's still a clone.
Terminology notes
1. Transhumanism is more than mind upload - mind upload is only a subset of transhumanism and, as it goes for any complex thinking, not all transhumanists agree with mind upload of even consider it feasible.
2. Transhumanism is about improving human through technology. What defines an improvement is of course a subject of large debate (what defines human also - Juan Enriquez gave a
great talk about future speciation of mankind and of course antispecism comes into play too: what about uplifted animals, artificial intelligences and
advanced simulations). Usually, improvement is considered as the opposite of medicine: medicine helps someone falling below what the society considers as a standard of performance (mobility, sensing, acting, etc.) to come back to this standard (prosthesis, glasses, psychotherapy, etc.) whereas transhumanism aims to outreach this said level (better, stronger, faster than the average human, but also different, as in being able to enjoy a magnetic sculpture or see the ultraviolet, live more than 120 years, thought access to machines for more than just compensating tetraplegy, adapting to lack of food, extremes in temperature or various (extra-)planetary conditions, like zero-g adaptation and any kind of panspermia)
3. An extended definition of transhumanism deals also with societal consequences of such adaptation. 3D printing, unfriendly AI (read
Elon Musk on it and if you want more in-depth material than just a warning,
Eliezer Yudkowsky's, Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk as well as
http://intelligenceexplosion.com), post-scarcity society (including reputation-as-a-money, a topic where cryptos 2.0 are of great importance)
I wrote a progressive introduction to transhumanism that you may find interesting: progressive introduction to transhumanism… and beyond (English version at the end)
== NBIC Convergence ==
Level 1: NBIC
Level 2: Convergence
== Near ==
The Eyeborg documentary youtu.be/TW78wbN-WuU
Real Humans enwp.org/Real_Humans
== Lointain ==
Will our kids be of on.ted.com/Enriquez12
a different species?
Intelligence explosion intelligenceexplosion.com/
Transhuman Space enwp.org/Transhuman_Space
Eclipse Phase enwp.org/Eclipse_Phase
Accelerando enwp.org/Accelerando
Orion's Arm orionsarm.com
== Tangent ==
The Power of the blockchain plus.google.com/explore/powerofblockchain
Now that this preamble on terminology is done, let's go to the heart of the topic.
Cloning is done on a daily basis - read about equine cloning (for whole living creatures) or about the future of organ transplants (use sterm cells to clone a healthy version of your liver). The main barrier for human cloning is ethical, not technological (I am not 100% sure, but I think humans embryos have been cloned, then destroyed pretty quickly - the whole thing was illegal, but illegal != technologically impossible)
Perfect copy (including the mind) is another matter. First, we don't know what is the mind, the consciousness. It may be possible that perfect cloning is impossible if the mind is stored at a quantum level, but this also is unknown. Assuming perfectly digitizing a mind and creating a convincing emulation of the body are possible, the issues at hand would be about identity. Two of the most important issues are
- continuation of identity. On this topic, I encourage you to read about the Theseus' paradox (a.k.a. "Ship of Theseus") a question that Ancient Greeks already pondered, and to also watch Vanilla Sky for how continuation of identity is possible as long as it is progressive (which is the whole point of the Theseus' paradox). Or, more simply, consider how you continue to see your desktop PC as "your PC" when you only change one component at a time (this is especially true if your PC has a name, which is a common occurence among real geeks - a category to wich I consider I belong, so this is not derogatory)
- multiple copies. Contrary to the analog world where perfect copy is nigh-impossible, perfect copy is central to the digital world. It is also hugely disruptive for any society as long as more than one is active at the same time (if it is not, this is simply a backup). I recently started a conversation about how the double-spending-proof nature of the blockchain might solve this issue - there is a reason why there are so many h+ in crypto.
It might function similar to how a computer virus does. Since it can process all sensory data in an extremely fast manner, it would do it very quickly, then lay dormant with idle bandwidth awaiting triggers for it to leap into action to do something. The notion of time would either become irrelevant, or extremely monotonous, since you would process all external sensory very quickly and constantly wait on something new. So there you are sitting at 0.0000001% CPU utilization forever.
You fall to the classical no-growth fallacy (watch
AlBartlett on this). That is, not taking into consideration that new resources bring new uses (this also explain why altcoins exist, by the way: since there is a new resource, the "clone" button on Git, then new uses, the altcoins, are possible). We won't sit à 0.0000001% forever.
Horror vacui (nature abbhors vacuum). Like a perfect gas expands untils it fills a container, a digital entity would use its computing power until it reaches 99% (100% being considered impossible). But I grant that we have no idea what it could do with all of this power, much like a dog has no idea how what we can do with your brain power.
I welcome everyone, transhumanist or not, to share his thoughts about these topics and others.
