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AN INFINITE LIFE
august 13 2023, edited april 22 2024
is happiness relative? being able to answer this will be important to deciding whether we will be living infinite lives in either one of our realities: virtual or physical.
a great conversation has something special in it. a great meal has something special in it. a great song has something special in it. does this special feeling last forever, or is it relative to the previous classes of that object in which you've encountered?
it almost seems like we want to stay alive because we know that eventually, we will encounter that special something. something to look forward to. is it the reason why we want to live? is it hard coded into the human loss function, to maximize reward?
as i get older, the more i am afraid of dying. so, i've been thinking about my own conciousness, and if our body is actually an essential part of our consciousness. is the body a vessel for conciousness? does the consistent flow of thoughts and feelings that makes us concious solely live in the mind? in the metaverse, you can select youself to be any different type of character, like a shark or an alien. however, you still feel like yourself. i think that this lends towards our body just being a vessel for our conciousness.
what makes us human? is it our flaws? do two thumbs on two hands make us human? bipedal walking? we know that its not creativity - chatgpt can come up with much wilder stories than most people i know. the line gets blurred the more technology advances and the closer we get to the singularity.
i'd like to know if we can download our brain into a computer, somehow transfer our being into a robotic body and STILL be there have the same conscious flow. it would be so cool to see if someone can figure that out, maybe that's the key to immortality? context switching from body to body?
physically traveling from Mars to Earth in the best case scenario will take about two months. however, there is a 22 minute communication delay from Mars to Earth. once our brain has been uploaded to a computer, we will be able to "context switch" from one robotic body to the next. this might be the most practical way to do teleportation, in that we transfer our mind from our Earth body to our Mars body by packing our concious being into a light wave that travels through our solar system and arrives at the requested planet.
truly being immortal comes with a lot of...negatives. dont get me wrong but i love being human and i love "bio stack" humanity. but electronic minds modeled in our likeness, aka AGI, should be considered a part of humanity. they are, after all, our progeny.
we might do a metamorphisis, starting our with our biological being and transferring to a silicon being. this silicon being will be able to live in both virtual reality and in physical reality. this will be able to extend our lifetime for a virtually infinite amount of time, which is good. some people think this might be unnatural, or that it is messing with fate...but how do you know your fate isn't to transfer to a silicon body and live to be thousands of years old? i think that a lot of people would like to decide how long they live for, especially if you aren"t bounded by an old biological body.
many argue that the meaning is life is due to the constraint of limited time. they think that fun things are fun just because theres a finite amount of time in our life to have fun, and that things are fun because we have pain and suffering in life that makes it feel so good. what if having fun is independent of suffering, what if fun is fun? happiness is happy? is good is unbounded from evil?
transferring our consciousness into a silicon body may very well be our next evolution. i call it the sapien evolution. akin to a caterpillar blossoming into a butterfly. our next stage of being. from human being to silicon being.
i think that the introduction of capable LLMS will be one of the core memories of my lifetime. it was the first time that something using machine learning made me go, "wow, this is useful. wow, this has something special". and it does have something special, but it is special in the same way that humans are special? most research in neuroscience has lead us to believe that we are simply scaled up versions of ape brains.
there are a lot of people that are starting to be afraid of ai. granted, there are surely a lot of reasons why, but one might feel this fear because it is attacking what we consider to be so very human -- creativity, abstract reasoning, and language.
it seems that language isn't actually that special. look into Moravec's paradox. biological animals have insanely impressive navigation systems. even with the tiniest of brains, like fruit flies, can navigate their environment with supreme precision and swiftness. even for humans, just think about how many activities in our day to day life requires a good navigation system. practically everything you do. how much of those involve human communication? a lot, but not nearly as many. William G. Allyn, Professor of Medical Optics states that “more than 50 percent of the cortex...is devoted to processing visual information”. how crazy is that?
our ability to simulate and imagine things inside our brain is also something super special and fascinating.
the most ancient mammals were able to do it, why has it been so hard for us to replicate it? it's probably very cheap and simple to implement, but you have to get the details exactly right.
billions of dollars and millions of man hours each year are poured into trying to make self driving cars that are at least as good as the average human. as of august 2023, the most advanced navigation or vision system doesn't seem to be anywhere close to mine. let alone a fruit fly, which only have 150,000 neurons.
a great navigational system that allows you to simulate possible futures is the reason why we don't have little robots running around everywhere, stocking shelves and preparing meals for us. i can't wait for those to be introduced into the world.
go out there and make something you feel special. make sure everyone who encounters it benefit from it, whether its just yourself or something for all of humanity.
a lot of people do stuff only for money. there's no love involved. after a certain price point, once you can feed you and your family, you should prioritize doing what you love.
try to find what you love. it worth it, but it can be hard. it takes a lot of effort. it takes a lot of time. it takes a lot of dedication. it takes a lot of work. it takes a lot of failing.
i realized what i wanted to work on while i was reading The Alchemist. try to find god's message in it, whomever your god is.
look back into what you did as a kid. what did you used to love to do? was there anything that you were obsessed with? what made you feel happy and inspired? whatever it was, try to find something similar to do. the basis of what you love was formed in your childhood and you will enjoy doing similar things. don't wirehead yourself with infinite doomscrolling.
in the Singularity there will be two types of people. the wireheads, and those with godlike levels of skill. those who can create new planets, new stars, new universes.
space is evergrowing while your time is everslowing. enjoy this journey to heat death, or dare to answer The Last Question.