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AN INFINITE LIFE
august 13, 2023
Can your brain produce an infinite supply of happiness? Being able to answer this will be able to answer lots of questions about the future of humanity.
A great conversation has something special in it. A great meal has something special in it. A great song has something special in it. Can this special feeling last forever, or will it fade to zero in the limit?
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?
Can consciousness can be separated from the body? Can I be uploaded to a computer? Yes, we will be able to perfectly replicate ones brain into a digital circuit. But will that be me?
If we can somehow transfer our Being into a robotic body and STILL be there, having the same conscious flow, 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 conscious being into a light wave that travels through our solar system and arrives at the requested planet.
We might do a metamorphosis, starting 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 of life is due to the constraint of limited time. They think that fun things are fun just because there's 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 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 is it special in the same way that humans are special? Most research in neuroscience has led us to believe that we are simply scaled-up versions of ape brains.
There are a lot of people who 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, they can navigate their environment with supreme precision and swiftness. Even for humans, just think about how many activities in our day-to-day life require 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 has 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.
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 ever-growing while your time is ever-slowing. Enjoy this journey to heat death, or dare to answer The Last Question.